Abstract

Sometimes documentation only available for the post delivery maintenance is the source code itself. This happens all too frequently when maintaining legacy systems, i.e. software in current use but developed not earlier than 15 or 20 years.Under these circumstances, maintaining the code can be extremely difficult. One way of handling this problem is to start with source code and attempt to recreate the design documents or even the specifications. This process is called Reverse Engineering. CASE tools can assist with this process. One of the simplest is a pretty printer, which may help display the code more clearly. Other tools construct diagrams such as flow charts or UML diagrams, directly from the source code, these visual aids can help in the process of design recovery. Once the maintenance team has reconstructed the design, there are two possibilities, one alternative is to attempt to reconstruct the specifications, modify the reconstructed specifications to reflect the necessary changes, and reimplement the product the usual way, and with in the context of reverse engineering, the usual development process that proceeds from analysis through design to implementation is called forward engineering. The process of forward engineering and reverse engineering combinely called as roundtrip engineering. This paper explains about how it can be achieved using UML with Rational Rose and JAVA