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javareverse-engineering

Reverse Engineering in Java

I know that the same question has been asked many times on SO and I have gone through most of the threads. However, I still dot not have a satisfactory answer, so I thought of asking from community.

I am being assigned the work to do reverse engineering to a module and have the following issues:

  1. The team has no idea what exactly is in the underlying component (Module is a third party solution)
  2. Team was only working on testing part so they can only provide me information about the flow, but what is the starting point and which is where they have no idea.

Now they want me to dig through the code base and come up with class diagrams as well as sequence flow etc.

I have never worked in my professional life in this kind of situation where there is no idea where to start and how to do this work. The only thing I have is source code.

I have two questions where I want the help:

  1. Is there any plugin for Eclipse which can generate class diagrams automatically from the source code?
  2. What should the approach be when one is in this kind of situation?

Update: I will have access to the source code. So I am more inclined towards the best approach to accomplish the task

Solution

  • There are several Java decompilers that will help you, such as JD-Core, and there's an Eclipse version of it.