Introduction to the special issue on software analysis, evolution and reengineering

Software analysis, evolution, and reengineering are important areas of the software life cycle. The quest to maintain and keep operational large mission critical systems has always been a challenge for software practitioners. This special issue presents a compilation of papers covering six major areas namely, program understanding, tools and environments, source code modeling, component recovery, migration to network-centric platforms, and binary reverse engineering and reengineering. These papers are re-worked and extended versions of papers that appeared in the Working Conference on Reverse Engineering. We hope that the readers will find this collection of papers useful as it provides an indicative view of the current work in the areas of software analysis, evolution, and reengineering.