Difference Between Forward Engineering And Reverse Engineering

What Is Forward Engineering?

Forward engineering is a method of creating or making an application with the help of a given requirements from a client or consumer. With forward engineering, the program/application is developed from scratch and all approaches and planning is needed to be done before actual development gets started. This type of engineering has different principles in various software and database processes. The outcome of forward engineering is an efficient and reliable product.

What You Need To Know About Forward Engineering

• Forward engineering is a method of creating or making an application with the help of a given requirements from a client or consumer.
• Forward engineering is prescriptive in nature, where the developers need to follow particular rules for the proper results.
• Forward engineering is time consuming when compared to reverse engineering.
• In forward engineering, production process begins with the system specification and includes design and implementation of the developing system.
• The final model of forward engineering must be complete and exact.
• Forward engineering requires high skill and competencies.
• Examples of forward engineering are construction of electronic kit, construction of DC motors etc.

What Is Reverse Engineering?

Reverse engineering also referred to as backward engineering is the process of discovering the principles of functioning of a software system through analysis of its operation i.e discovering the classes, structure and method names, interfaces and sometimes having only binaries. With reverse engineering, the design engineer starts with the final product and works through the process in the opposite direction to arrive at the product design specification. During the process, vital information about the design concept and manufacturing methods is discovered.

Reverse engineering is done to retrieve the source code of a program because the source code was lost, to study how the program performs certain operations, to improve the performance of a program, to fix a bug (correct an error in the program when the source code is not available), to identify malicious content in a program such a virus or to a program written for use with one microprocessor for use with another.

What You Need To Know About Reverse Engineering

• Reverse engineering is the process of recovering the design, requirement specifications and functions of a product from an analysis of its code.
• Reverse engineering is adaptive whereby the engineer has to discover what the developer did.
• Reverse engineering is less time consuming when compared to reverse engineering.
• In reverse engineering, production process starts with the existing system and the development technique for the replacement is based on interpretation.
• An imperfect or partial model is still useful in reverse engineering.
• Reverse engineering does not require a lot of skills.
• An example of reverse engineering is research on instruments etc.

Difference Between Forward Engineering And Reverse Engineering In Tabular Form