Supporting Reverse Engineering Tasks with a Fuzzy Repository Framework

Software reverse engineering (RE) is often hindered not by the lack of available data, but by an overabundance of it: the (semi-)automatic analysis of static and dynamic code information, data, and documentation results in a huge heap of often incomparable data. Additionally, the gathered information is typically fraught with various kinds of imperfections, for example conflicting information found in software documentation vs. program code.

Our approach to this problem is twofold: for the management of the diverse RE results we propose the use of a repository, which supports an iterative and incremental discovery process under the aid of a reverse engineer. To deal with imperfections, we propose to enhance the repository model with additional representation and processing capabilities based on fuzzy set theory and fuzzy belief revision.