An integrated and interactive reverse engineering environment for existing software comprehension

Software comprehension is an incremental process to support the understanding of both the behaviour and the structure of software system. It uses the existing documentation of the system and completes it with information deduced from the code by means of reverse engineering tools. Current reverse engineering tools produce pre-defined sets of reports and, in some cases, furnish answers to fixed kinds of queries, thus being inadequate to completely support software comprehension. An interactive reverse engineering environment is described which supports information extraction and abstraction processes about a software system.>