TCSE
IEEE Technical Council
on Software Engineering
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Letter from the Chair(November 2003) Welcome to this web site! And welcome to the exciting world of reverse engineering! It is well known that up to 80% of the costs in the software life cycle are devoted to maintaining and evolving existing systems and that programmers spend about 50% of their time on just analyzing the system before they can make any changes. If we want to reduce the overall costs for software development, we have to find ways to reduce this time. This web site is devoted to reverse engineering, a software engineering discipline that addresses the analysis of existing systems through proven techniques, tools, practices, and methods. There are many definition of reverse engineering (for instance, the most often cited one by Cross and Chikofsky), but my favorite stems from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"Probability axis?" "Yes. Where it hasn't been blown up. OK. So you're the Guide. How do we get a lift?" "Reverse engineering." "What?" "Reverse engineering. To me the flow of time is irrelevant. You decide what you want. I then merely make sure that it has already happened." "You're joking." "Anything is possible." Reverse engineering has been with us since the early days of software development. Every programmer reverse engineers her or his code whenever she or he touches it - usually on a very low scale, sometimes on a a very large scale. Analysts from Forrester research, for instance, have estimated that migrating to "Basel II" will cost an average bank (e.g., Deutsche Bank, ING, ABN AMRO) approximately 115 million Euros. 60% of these costs concern changes that need to be made to the bank's information systems. Such high impact changes cannot be made without a clear picture of the architecture of the underlying information systems. Research on reverse engineering is relatively young. Last year, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehension, a conference devoted to cognitive aspects in program understanding. This year, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE), a conference that addresses the technical and methodological aspects. Happy birthday, WCRE! Although this field is relatively young, we have sufficient experiences to review. At WCRE, we will critically assess the past achievements and future challenges of our research (look for these results on this web site). Amongst the achievements is certainly the infrastructure for our research. This web site is a part of it. It provides links to many projects in this area. It is meant as a portal to all researchers, teachers, and practitioners in reverse engineering. We will continuously update it with all ongoing activities. Let us know about your activities. The reverse engineering community, as I know it from the very beginning, is a great and friendly crowd, full of enthusiasm for the archaeology of software. We encourage you to take part in our community. Feel free to browse through the information we have provided on our web site and to to contact us if you have any questions or comments. After all, this is your web site. Rainer Koschke
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