Software archaeology

Software archaeology or source code archeology is the study of poorly documented or undocumented legacy software implementations, as part of software maintenance.^[1]^[2] Software archaeology, named by analogy with archaeology,^[3] includes the reverse engineering of software modules, and the application of a variety of tools and processes for extracting and understanding program structure and recovering design information.^[1]^[4] Software archaeology may reveal dysfunctional team processes which have produced poorly designed or even unused software modules, and in some cases deliberately obfuscatory code may be found.^[5] The term has been in use for decades.^[6]

Software archaeology has continued to be a topic of discussion at more recent software engineering conferences.^[7]

^ ^a ^b Robles, Gregorio; Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus M.; Herraiz, Israel (2005). "An Empirical Approach to Software Archaeology" (PDF). Poster Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance.
^ Ambler, Scott W. "Agile Legacy System Analysis and Integration Modeling". agilemodeling.com. Retrieved 2010-08-20. Without accurate documentation, or access to knowledgeable people, your last resort may be to analyze the source code for the legacy system... This effort is often referred to as software archaeology.
^ Moyer, Bryon (4 March 2009). "Software Archeology: Modernizing Old Systems" (PDF). Embedded Technology Journal.
^ Hopkins, Richard; Jenkins, Kevin (2008). "5. The Mythical Metaman". Eating the IT Elephant: Moving from greenfield development to brownfield. Addison-Wesley. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-13-713012-2.
^ Spinellis, Diomidis; Gousios, Georgios (2009). "2. A Tale of Two Systems § Lack of Cohesion". Beautiful Architecture. O'Reilly. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-596-51798-4.
^ An early discussion is Grass, Judith E. (Winter 1992). "Object-Oriented Design Archaeology with CIA++" (PDF). Computing Systems. 5 (1).
^ For example, the "32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering". May 2010..

[RGBH-1] Robles, Gregorio; Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus M.; Herraiz, Israel (2005). "An Empirical Approach to Software Archaeology" (PDF). Poster Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance.

[2] Ambler, Scott W. "Agile Legacy System Analysis and Integration Modeling". agilemodeling.com. Retrieved 2010-08-20. Without accurate documentation, or access to knowledgeable people, your last resort may be to analyze the source code for the legacy system... This effort is often referred to as software archaeology.

[3] Moyer, Bryon (4 March 2009). "Software Archeology: Modernizing Old Systems" (PDF). Embedded Technology Journal.

[4] Hopkins, Richard; Jenkins, Kevin (2008). "5. The Mythical Metaman". Eating the IT Elephant: Moving from greenfield development to brownfield. Addison-Wesley. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-13-713012-2.

[5] Spinellis, Diomidis; Gousios, Georgios (2009). "2. A Tale of Two Systems § Lack of Cohesion". Beautiful Architecture. O'Reilly. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-596-51798-4.

[6] An early discussion is Grass, Judith E. (Winter 1992). "Object-Oriented Design Archaeology with CIA++" (PDF). Computing Systems. 5 (1).

[7] For example, the "32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering". May 2010..

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