Insight: Reverse Engineer Case Tool

Abstract

Building upon existing software systems while maintaining or improving software quality is a major goal of software engineering. To achieve this, every software engineering phase (requirements analysis, software design, implementation, testing and maintenance) must produce good quality outputs for the next phase. We believe that a next generation reverse engineering tool can assist in realizing this need. InSight is a new and powerful CASE toolset for software developers and architects, designed to support the development and maintenance of software throughout the complete lifecycle. The inSight tool suite provides software architects and developers with new capabilities of understanding existing software systems, allowing them to ask their day-to-day questions directly to the tool and receive up-to-date answers while interacting with the tool. It includes data mining capabilities such as code flow extraction, and software interaction extraction such as operating system and application specific messaging, uses, needs, etc. The inSight tool suite also includes powerful graphical interfaces for presenting and manipulating the extracted information. Control flow is presented as editable flowcharts. InSight supports Protel, ANSI C, and C++. InSight uses a patent pending reverse engineering technique to perform these extractions.