ITPEC FE Subject A April 2025 Question 39

Reverse engineering — working backwards from the code to its design, such as a class diagram.

Reverse engineering analyses an existing program to recover higher-level information: specifications, design documents and models. Generating a UML class diagram from source code is a typical case, and many UML tools do it automatically, which helps when maintaining poorly documented software.

Answer (d)

Why not others:

• •(a) Backtracking — a search technique that abandons a partial solution and returns to the last choice point; it has nothing to do with models
• •(b) Forward engineering — the normal direction, from design models to code, such as generating code from a class diagram
• •(c) Re-engineering — rebuilding an existing system by reverse engineering it and then forward engineering an improved version; the task here stops at the diagram

Key rule: Forward engineering goes from design to code, reverse engineering from code to design, and re-engineering does both to renew a system.

Software Development Management Techniques · AI-written, may contain errors