Building reverse engineering tools with software components: Towards a dedicated development process for academia

The author´s dissertation explores a new approach to construct tools in the domain of reverse engineering. The approach leverages already available (off-the-shelf) components and products, assembling and customizing them programmatically. This approach can be characterized as component-based tool-building (CBTD). While many academic tools follow CBTD - presumable with the goal to save time and effort -, this approach is still pursued in an ad hoc manner. The author strives to advance the current state of CBTD towards a discipline that is more predictable and formal. This is achieved with two major research contributions. The first contribution states the necessary requirements for a tool-building process in academia in the domain of reverse engineering. These process requirements have been identified with a literature survey of the current tool-building approaches that exist in academia as well as the authorpsilas first-hand experience. The second contribution is a dedicated process framework for CBTD that meets the process requirements identified by the first contribution. The process framework is a first step towards formalizing CBTD with the goal to help researchers to build tools in a more predictable and effective manner.