Saturday, March 10, 2007

Reverse Engineering Tools That Are Not.

I've been researching for the last week for a good reverse engineering tool that would simply get handed in a large C++ codebase and would automatically walk through all the classes, functions, variables and interfaces for the purpose of generating a visualization of the live flow of code.

At the end of my research I was able to find a good reverse engineering tool called Understand for C++ and Understand for Java. This was one of the best I found. I decided to use it, was impressive, but not too impressive, it still lacked lots of stuff I needed.

Looking around, I felt a bit hopeless, until I got introduced to automated document generators.

A code documentation generator would prove as the best reverse engineering tool ever. For reverse engineering purposes, I dont think I need to go any further.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Check MaintainJ(www.maintainj.com) if you are looking for Java reverse engineering. It you are looking for runtime sequence diagrams to understand the 'live flow', it is the tool you should try. The sequence diagrams are easy to read with collapse/expand operations and the diagrams are simple and clutter free.