Building Reverse Engineering Tools with Software Components: Ten Lessons Learned

My dissertation explores a new approach to construct tools in the domain of reverse engineering. The approach uses already available software components as building blocks, combining and customizing them programmatically. This approach can be characterized as component-based tool-building. The goal of the dissertation is to advance the current state of component-based tool-building towards a discipline that is more predictable and formal. This is achieved with three research contributions: (1) an in-depth literature survey that identifies requirements for reverse engineering tools, (2) a number of tool case studies that utilize component-based tool-building, (3) and ten lessons learned for tool builders that have been distilled from these case studies.