aka re-engineering. The process of analysing an existing system to identify its components and their interrelationships and create representations of the system in another form (implementation) or at a higher level of abstraction. Reverse engineering is usually undertaken in order to modify or redesign the system for better maintainability or to produce a copy of a system without access to the design from which it was originally produced.
For example, one might take the executable code of a computer program, run it to study how it behaved with different input and then attempt to write a program oneself which behaved identically (or better). An integrated circuit might also be reverse engineered by an unscrupulous company wishing to make unlicensed copies of a popular chip.
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