Hi all,

The project which I am working for requires me to do a reverse engineering of the existing system so that additional functionality can be added to the current system. Basically the existing system performs the risk analysis at the company level and now the management wants that the risk analysis should be done at the individual customer level. So to understand the process of risk analysis we had to do reverse engineering of the current system so that we could apply the same logic at the individual customer level also. So in my opinion performing reverse engineering is not a waste of time infact by doing so we need not work from the scratch atleast we have some baseline and then we can think on how to improve the current process.

Thanks

sonavi

I think that the first priority should be getting the functionality of the existing system right in the new, improved system,  One of the things to be wary of is that we don't disenfranchise anyone.  Through years of use of a system, even with a legacy system on a mainframe, users develop shortcuts and efficient ways of processing that the developers never imagined.  Some are added to the basic system through change requests after the system has been in use. We have to be careful in the re-engineering that we don't leave out these tricks and techniques the users employ to make the operation of the system easier.  We never want to take away anything the system does for the user, no matter how mundane it might seem, at least not without getting consent from the user (and it might be a single user).  A user may not complain if they don't get some extra functionality, but they will scream if you take something away.