Design recovery for distributed systems

Two factors limit the utility of reverse engineering technology for many distributed software systems. First, with the exception of tools that support Ada and its explicit tasking constructs, reverse engineering tools fail to capture information concerning the flow of information between tasks. Second, relatively few reverse engineering tools are available for programming languages in which many older legacy applications were written (e.g., Jovial, CMS-2, and various assembly languages). We describe approaches that were developed for overcoming these limitations. In particular, we have implemented an approach for automatically extracting task flow information from a command and control system written in CMS-2. Our approach takes advantage of a small amount of externally provided design knowledge in order to recover design information relevant to the distributed nature of the target system