REDO project archive

 project archive

This archive contains information relevant to the ESPRIT II REDO project (1989-1992) concerned with software maintenance and reverse engineering. Some files and tools are available via anonymous FTP. An index and a README file are available.

Personnel
Publications
Continuing work
Tools including the PRECCX compiler compiler
Other related work

See also REDO project entry in the CORDIS RTD Database from INTELLEC.

Personnel

The main project personnel were:

Jonathan Bowen, OUCL (site manager).
Peter Breuer, now at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain.
(Also peripatetically in the US.)
Kevin Lano, now at Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK.

Publications

There are bibliographies of project reports and publications in BibTeX database format, some of which are available on-line. The following may be of particular interest:

From Programs to Object Code and back again using Logic Programming: Compilation and Decompilation, Jonathan Bowen. Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice, 5(4), pp 205-234, December 1993.
Formal Specifications in Software Maintenance: From code to Z++ and back again, Jonathan Bowen, Peter Breuer and Kevin Lano. Information and Software Technology, 35(11/12), pp 679-690, November/December 1993.
A Compendium of Formal Techniques for Software Maintenance, Jonathan Bowen, Peter Breuer (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and Kevin Lano (Lloyd's Register). IEE/BCS Software Engineering Journal, 8(5), pp 253-262, September 1993.
Decompilation, Jonathan Bowen and Peter Breuer. Chapter 10 in Henk van Zuylen (ed.), The REDO Compendium: Reverse Engineering for Software Maintenance, John Wiley & Sons, pp 131-138, 1993.
Creating Specifications from Code: Reverse Engineering Techniques, Peter Breuer and Kevin Lano, Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice, 3, pp 145-162, 1991.
Understanding Programs through Formal Methods, Peter Breuer and Kevin Lano and Jonathan Bowen. Chapter 15 in Henk van Zuylen (ed.), The REDO Compendium: Reverse Engineering for Software Maintenance, John Wiley & Sons, pp 195-223, 1993. Also previously issued as a Programming Research Group Technical Report PRG-TR-15-91.
Reverse Engineering COBOL via Formal Methods, Kevin Lano, Peter Breuer and Howard Haughton. Chapter 16 in Henk van Zuylen (ed.), The REDO Compendium: Reverse Engineering for Software Maintenance, John Wiley & Sons, pp 225-248, 1993.
The PRECC Compiler-Compiler, Peter Breuer and Jonathan Bowen. In Elwyn Davies and Andrew Findlay (eds.), Proc. UKUUG/SUKUG Joint New Year 1993 Conference, Oxford, UK, 6-8 January 1993. UKUUG/SUKUG Secretariat, Owles Hall, Buntingford, Herts SG9 9PL, UK, pp 167-182, 1993.
Occam's Razor: The Cutting Edge of Parser Technology, Jonathan Bowen and Peter Breuer. In Proc. TOULOUSE 92: Fifth International Conference on Software Engineering and its Applications, Toulouse, France, 7-11 December 1992. Available from EC2, 269/287 rue de la Garenne, 92024 Nanterre Cedex, France.
Decompilation is the Efficient Enumeration of Types, Peter Breuer and Jonathan Bowen. In M. Billaud et al. (eds.), Journées de Travail WSA'92 Analyse Statique, Bordeaux, France, 23-25 September 1992, BIGRE 81-82, IRISA-Campus de Beaulieu, F-35042 Rennes cedex, France, pp 255-273, 1992.
User Interface Languages: A survey of existing methods, Gregory Abowd, Jonathan Bowen (Oxford University) and Alan Dix, Michael Harrison and Roger Took (University of York). Programming Research Group Technical Report PRG-TR-5-89, 65pp, October 1989.

Note that for published journal papers, only the original drafts are available on-line. See the journal for the final (improved) versions.

The REDO Compendium: Reverse Engineering for Software Maintenance, edited by H.J. van Zuylen (John Wiley & Sons, 1993, ISBN 0-471-93607-3) summarises the work of the entire project.
Reverse Engineering and Software Maintenance: A Practical Approach by Kevin Lano and Howard Haughton (McGraw-Hill, International Series in Software Engineering, 1993, ISBN 0-07-707897-7) was completed largely as a result of experience gained on the project.

Other OUCL Technical Reports by Jonathan Bowen, Peter Breuer and Kevin Lano are available. (E.g., see The REDO project: final report.) OUCL and project reports are available from the librarian. See also on-line papers by Kevin Lano.

Continuing work

Decompilation: The Enumeration of Types and Grammars, Peter Breuer (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and Jonathan Bowen. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), 16(5), pp 1613-1647, September 1994.
Previously issued as Programming Research Group Technical Report PRG-TR-11-92, 28pp, May 1992.
A PREttier Compiler-Compiler: Generating Higher Order Parsers in C, Peter Breuer and Jonathan Bowen. Programming Research Group Technical Report PRG-TR-20-92, 25pp, November 1992. To appear in Software - Practice and Experience.
Generating Decompilers, Peter Breuer (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and Jonathan Bowen. Provisionally accepted by Information and Software Technology.

Tools

A PRECCX compiler compiler tool was produced on the project and is available on-line. After the end of the REDO project, the company Piercom have commercialised some of the tools initially developed on the project.

Other related work

Research by the ESPRIT ProCoS project on provably correct compilation inspired the work on decompilation.
REFINE language tools from Reasoning Systems, Inc.
Information on re-engineering (especially research).
Formal methods in general in the WWW Virtual Library on the World Wide Web.
Software Maintenance information from the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.
Software Maintenance abstracts from Research Access.
Mail Order Reverse Engineering (M.O.R.E.) Leverage Technologists.
Reverse Engineering - An Overview, book from HMSO.
Centre for Software Maintenance, Department of Computer Science, University of Durham, UK:
- Papers by Martin Ward on reverse engineering may be of related interest.
- The Maintainer's Assistant, a tool for reverse engineering and re-engineering code using formal methods. Produced as part of the ReForm project: From assembler to Z using formal transformations.
- BYLANDS project on safety-critical software systems maintenance, reverse engineering and development.
- REMOULD, reverse engineering for C.

For further information, please contact redo-request@comlab.ox.ac.uk, Jonathan Bowen or use the comments page.

Maintained as part of the OUCL archive.