Methods
Reverse Engineering
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Reverse engineering is the process of examining an existing object, device, process or piece of software to determine how it was designed or how it works without access to its original design documentation, typically in order to reproduce it, repair it, adapt it or understand it for security analysis. The practice is far older than its modern name: a frequently cited early example is the Roman military's capture and reverse engineering of a Carthaginian quinquereme warship in 264 BC during the First Punic War, which let Rome build and optimize a fleet of three hundred ships in three months and contest Carthaginian naval superiority. In modern engineering, reverse engineering is used to recreate obsolete parts with no surviving drawings, to build a digital CAD model from a physical object by measurement or 3D scanning, and to analyze competitors' products or historical artifacts.
Facts
Core PrincipleWork backward from a finished object or system, through measurement, disassembly, testing or code analysis, to recover the design information that produced it. 1 Origin Year264 BC is the earliest widely cited documented instance, the Roman army's reverse engineering of a captured Carthaginian quinquereme, not the practice's true origin, which is undocumented and likely as old as toolmaking itself. Cross-Tradition Connections
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