A Pattern Language for Reverse Engineering

This pattern language describes how to reverse engineer an object-oriented soft- ware system. Since the only way to achieve a truly reusable object-oriented design is recog- nised to be iterative development, reverse engineering is indeed an essential facet of any object-oriented development process. The pattern language itself covers the different phases one encounters when reverse engineering a large software system: from being unfamiliar with a software system up untill preparations for actual reengineering. What you read here is a short version of a complete pattern language. We present only five patterns in full detail and include a summary for the remaining patterns.