Strongest postcondition semantics as the formal basis for reverse engineering

Author

Gannod, Gerald C. ; Cheng, Betty H C

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI, USA

fYear

1995

fDate

14-16 Jul 1995

Firstpage

188

Lastpage

197

Abstract

Reverse engineering of program code is the process of constructing a higher level abstraction of an implementation in order to facilitate the understanding of a system that may be in a “legacy” or “geriatric” state. Changing architectures and improvements in programming methods, including formal methods in software development and object-oriented programming, have prompted a need to reverse engineer and re-engineer program code. This paper describes the application of the strongest postcondition predicate transformer (strongest postcondition) as the formal basis for the reverse engineering of imperative program code

Keywords

formal specification; object-oriented programming; reverse engineering; systems re-engineering; formal methods; geriatric system; higher level abstraction; imperative program code; legacy system; object-oriented programming; program understanding; reverse engineering; software development; strongest postcondition predicate transformer; strongest postcondition semantics; system re-engineering; Accidents; Application software; Computer architecture; Computer science; Error correction codes; Formal specifications; Object oriented modeling; Object oriented programming; Reverse engineering; Software maintenance;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Reverse Engineering, 1995., Proceedings of 2nd Working Conference on

Conference_Location

Toronto, Ont.

Print_ISBN

0-8186-711-43

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WCRE.1995.514707

Filename

514707