Reverse Engineering It is impossible to create requirements and test artifacts by reverse engineering with complete accuracy as explained in this paper. Still, it's a valuable aide for gaining knowledge of existing systems, even though understanding the system as actually built and uncovering known usage modes are difficult.

Reconstructing the design of existing software is especially important for complex legacy systems, but can be a challenge because documents are often not available, dispersed and focused on isolated algorithms and data structures. This makes the formation of a higher-level structural models a time consuming, piece-meal activity. Reverse engineering has been touted as the solution to these issues, but the reality is that it can only automate some design...

. . Design recovery must reproduce all of the information required for a person to fully understand what a program does, how it does it, why it does it, and so forth. Thus, it deals with a far wider range of information than found in conventional software engineering representations or code." (Biggerstaff, 1989).
For a large software system, the reconstruction of the structural aspects of its architecture through reverse engineering is also is beneficial. Software structure is the collection of artifacts that include software components such as…