This paper analyzes the requirements that CASE tools should meet for effective database reverse engineering (DBRE), and proposes
a general architecture for data-centered applications reverse engineering CASE environments. First, the paper describes a
generic DBMS-independent DBRE methodology, then it analyzes the main characteristics of DBRE activities in order to collect
a set of desirable requirements. Finally, it describes DB-MAIN, an operational CASE tool developed according to these requirements.
The main features of this tool that are described in this paper are its unique generic specification model, its repository,
its transformation toolkit, its user interface, the text processors, the assistants, the methodological control and its functional
extensibility. Finally, the paper describes five real-world projects in which the methodology and the CASE tool were applied.
Keywords reverse engineering - database engineering - program understanding - methodology - CASE tools
This is a heavily revised and extended version of “Requirements for Information System Reverse Engineering Support” by J.-L.
Hainaut, V. Englebert, J. Henrard, J.-M. Hick, D. Roland, which first appeared in the Proceedings of the Second Working Conference
on Reverse Engineering, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 136–145, July 1995. This paper presents some results of the DB-MAIN
project. This project is partially supported by the Région Wallonne, the European Union, and by a consortium comprising ACEC-OSI (Be), ARIANE-II (Be), Banque UCL (Lux), BBL (Be), Centre de recherche public H.
Tudor (Lux), CGER (Be), Cockerill-Sambre (Be), CONCIS (Fr), D'Ieteren (Be), DIGITAL, EDF (Fr), EPFL (CH), Groupe S (Be), IBM,
OBLOG Software (Port), ORIGIN (Be), Ville de Namur (Be), Winterthur (Be), 3 Suisses (Be). The DB-Process subproject is supported
by the Communauté Française de Belgique.