Reverse engineering is a scientific way to see how a product works and what its formation is. Through the execution of reverse engineering services, experts analyse an object and know how it works. They use the collected information to make a duplicate of the object or enhance the features and functionality of the same. Engineers apply this process for physical machines, software solutions, biological functions, and military technology.
What are its purposes?
Reverse engineering aims to collect information on how a system or object works. Engineers do this for several reasons. They use it to learn an object works and how to recreate it with additional features. With this process, engineers succeed in making products with enhanced features at a lower cost. They do this, as the original product is not available. Further, they apply this process to sort out compatibility issues and enable the hardware or software to work with the existing systems that it had compatible problems.
How does the reverse engineering process work?
The process of reverse engineering is particular to an object on which experts execute it. Usually, all reverse engineering efforts have three common steps. And the steps are as follows:
- The extraction of information
Experts study the object to extract information about its design. After that, they examine the extracted information to know how they can make the pieces fit well. For a software solution, engineers gather source code and study the associated design documents. They can use a few tools like a disassembler to break the solution into its different integral parts.
- Modelling – After the extraction, respective engineers abstract the collected information into a conceptual model. And each piece of the model explains its work in the complete structure. This step aims to collect information on an original item and abstract the information in a general model for the creation of a new product or solution.
- Review – In this process of reverse engineering services, experts review and test the model on several parameters to make sure that the abstraction is of an original item or system. In software reverse engineering, the process is software testing. After the completion of this process, experts move forward to duplicate the original product or system.
Summary
Reverse engineering is a value engineering process to study a product/system. After the study, experts extract information, abstract the collected information/model and review the model to make a new product or system with added features.