A practical program transformation system for reverse engineering

Program transformation systems provide one means of formally deriving a program from its specification. A tool called ReForm is described. It is designed to address the inverse problem to support the extraction of a specification from existing program code, using transformations. This is an important activity during software maintenance. One of the problems of transformation systems is the scarcity of practical tools which can address industrial scale problems, rather than contrived laboratory problems. An analysis of the important software engineering factors that contribute to a successful transformation based tool is provided. Results from using the tool are also presented