REVERSE ENGINEERING EXPLAINED !!

The process of duplicating an existing component, subassembly, or product, without the aid of drawings, documentation, or computer model is known as reverse engineering.

Need For Reverse Engineering:

• The original manufacturer of a product no longer produces a product
• There is inadequate documentation of the original design
• The original manufacturer no longer exists, but a customer needs the product
• The original design documentation has been lost or never existed
• Some bad features of a product need to be designed out. For example, excessive wear might indicate where a product should be improved
• To strengthen the good features of a product based on long-term usage of the product
• To analyze the good and bad features of competitors’ product
• To explore new avenues to improve product performance and features
• To gain competitive benchmarking methods to understand competitor’s products and develop better products
• The original CAD model is not sufficient to support modifications or current manufacturing methods
• The original supplier is unable or unwilling to provide additional parts
• The original equipment manufacturers are either unwilling or unable to supply replacement parts, or demand inflated costs for sole-source parts
• To update obsolete materials or antiquated manufacturing processes with more current, less-expensive technologies

Process Of Reverse Engineering:

• Identify the system’s components and their interrelationships
• Create representations of the system in another form or a higher level of abstraction
• Create the physical representation of that system

Reverse engineering is very common in such diverse fields as software engineering, entertainment, automotive, consumer products, microchips, chemicals, electronics, and mechanical designs. For example, when a new machine comes to market, competing manufacturers may buy one machine and disassemble it to learn how it was built and how it works. A chemical company may use reverse engineering to defeat a patent on a competitor’s manufacturing process. In civil engineering, bridge and building designs are copied from past successes so there will be less chance of catastrophic failure. In software engineering, good source code is often a variation of other good source code.