Beyond the Lone Reverse Engineer: Insourcing, Outsourcing and Crowdsourcing

When one imagines a reverse engineer at work, an image that often comes to mind is that of a lone engineer using advanced tools to help in design recovery. However, in practice the engineer may be part of a team that has to tackle the arduous task of documenting a system´s design. Often, such a team will be distributed and may have to work in an asynchronous manner. Moreover, sharing and combining knowledge will transient or non-team members further adds to the complexity of the task. These collaboration challenges are seldom discussed or even mentioned in the research literature. In this talk, I will explore how models, theories and technologies from the disciplines of computer supported cooperative work and social computing can improve and encourage collaboration in reverse engineering. I will briefly present several success stories on how social computing technologies have helped improve how small teams, distributed larger teams and the crowd tackle complex intellectual tasks in other areas of science. I will also describe some of our early work investigating how Web 2.0 social computing technologies, such as tagging and feeds facilitate collaborative software engineering. My hope is that these stories may spark ideas on how social computing might inspire new research in reverse engineering.