Software Engineering
Software Evolution & Maintenance
Part 4
)Program comprehension & Reverse Engineering(
T.A Mohammed Sultan
Modified from Sommerville’s originals
1
Program comprehension
Program comprehension
concerned with studying the way software engineers
understand programs.
Objective of studying program comprehension
design tools that will facilitate the understanding of large
programs.
2
Program Comprehension Strategies
The bottom-up model
The top-down model
The integrated model
3
The bottom-up model
• Comprehension starts with the source code and abstracting from it to reach the
overall comprehension of the system.
• Steps:
Read the source code
Mentally group together low-level programming details (chunks) to
build higher-level abstractions
Repeat until a high-level understanding of the program is formed
4
The top down model
• Comprehension starts with a general idea, or hypothesis,about how the system
works
• Often obtained from a very quick look at what components exist
• Steps
First formulate hypotheses about the system functionality
Verify whether these hypotheses are valid or not
Create other hypotheses, forming a hierarchy of hypotheses
Continue until the low-level hypotheses are matched to the source code
and proven to be valid or not
5
The Integrated Model
• Combines the top down and bottom up approaches.
• Empirical results show that maintainers tend to switch among the
different comprehension strategies depending on
The code under investigation
Their expertise with the system
6
Partial program comprehension
• Usually is not necessarily to understand the whole system if only part of it
needs to be maintained. But a high fraction of bugs arise from not
understanding enough!
Most software maintenance tasks can be met by answering seven basic questions:
How does control flow reach a particular location?
Where is a particular subroutine or procedure invoked?
What are the arguments and results of a function?
Where is a particular variable set, used or queried?
Where is a particular variable declared?
What are the input and output of a particular module?
Where are data objects accessed?
7
Reverse Engineering
• Process of analyzing a subject system to create representations of the system at
a higher level of abstraction.
• Going backwards through the development cycle.
Reverse Engineering
8
Two main levels of reverse engineering
Binary reverse engineering
• Take a binary executable
• Recover source code you can then modify
•Useful for companies that have lost their source code
•Used extensively by hackers
•Can be used legally, e.g. to enable your system to interface to existing system
•Illegal in some contexts
Source code reverse engineering
• Take source code
• Recover high level design information
• By far the most widely performed type of reverse engineering
9
Reverse engineering objectives
Cope with complexity
Have a better understanding of voluminous and complex systems
Extract relevant information and leave out low-level details
Generate alternative views
Enable the designers to analyze the system from different angles
Recover lost information
Changes made to the system are often undocumented;
This enlarges the gap between the design and the implementation
Reverse engineering techniques retrieve the lost information
10
Reverse engineering objectives
CDetect side effects
Detect problems due to the effect a change may have on the system before it results in
failure
Facilitate reuse
Detect candidate system components that can be reused
11
Source code reverse engineering techniques
• Program analysis
• Program slicing
• Design recovery
• Architecture recovery
12
Reverse engineering tools
The process of reverse engineering is accomplished by making use of some tools that are
categorized into:
Disassemblers – A disassembler is used to convert binary code into assembly code
and also used to extract strings, imported and exported functions, libraries etc. The
disassemblers convert the machine language into a user-friendly format. There are
different disassemblers that specialize in certain things.
Debuggers – This tool expands the functionality of a disassembler by supporting the
CPU registers, the hex duping of the program, view of stack etc. Using debuggers,
the programmers can set breakpoints and edit the assembly code at run time.
Debuggers analyze the binary in a similar way as the disassemblers and allow the
reverser to step through the code by running one line at a time to investigate the
results.
13
Reverse engineering tools
Hex Editors – These editors allow the binary to be viewed in the editor and change
it as per the requirements of the software. There are different types of hex editors
available that are used for different functions.
PE and Resource Viewer – The binary code is designed to run on a windows based
machine and has a very specific data which tells how to set up and initialize a
program. All the programs that run on windows should have a portable executable
that supports the DLLs the program needs to borrow from.
14
