Can we improve software quality by re-engineering?

The maintenance of applications constitutes a relevant issue, as a lot of effort goes in this task. CASE tools claim to be effective in producing efficient and error free software, but in many cases the aim is not to produce new application systems, but just to modify the existing ones. Re-engineering appears to be a suitable way of getting the advantages of the automated CASE tools, without incurring the costs involved in a complete redevelopment of the existing systems, whose specifications are sometimes obsolete and no more corresponding to the actual version of the software. In this paper, two different approaches towards the reconstruction of the software documentation are presented. In both cases, we move from the source code, and capture information pertinent to higher level design phases. The first approach is totally automatic, and uses a static code analyzer in order to get data that are subsequently imported into a CASE tool. In the second approach, a hypertextual application allows the user to "annotate" the code, inserting the pertinent information in the appropriate schema. Both the approaches show some potential benefits.