design recovery

design recovery

(process)A subtask of reverse engineering in which domainknowledge, external information, and deduction of fuzzyreasoning are added to the observations of the subject systemto identify meaningful higher level abstractions beyond thoseobtained directly by examining the system itself.

In other words, design recovery aims to work out what a systemor component was designed to do rather than just examining itssubcomponents and their interrelationships.