The future of reverse engineering

The structure of a software system progressively degrades unless remedial action is undertaken. This action, called preventative maintenance is very rarely undertaken, so that the software becomes harder to maintain. Thus legacy systems are the major focus of reverse engineering. A legacy system is defined informally as software which is extremely valuable to the organisation, often performing a key strategic function, but no one knows what to do with it. The software is too expensive to maintain, and is inflexible and unresponsive to user requested changes. On the other hand legacy systems are typically very large and valuable and extremely costly to redevelop. Of course legacy systems were never intended to be like this but it is a sobering thought that many new systems written today will be tomorrow´s legacy software. This is a consequence of management, not technical issues