Reverse Engineering

"Dem Ingenieur ist nichts zu schwör.", Daniel Düsentrieb, 1958, in Micky Maus, Heft 48 This is instrumental and describes my „life“ as a software engineer. The task: I need to focus. A real pain-in-the-ass task lies ahead of me: software re-engineering. "Pain in the ass" is probably a massive understatement. Phase 1 [0:00] involves staring at the source code for days on end. It was superbly documented—in the sense that there was absolutely nothing. According to the records, the developer who had once carved this absolute masterpiece into stone using COBOL had been dead for over ten years. Damn, I thought, briefly considering whether I should start sorting the old version-control floppy disks alphabetically by label instead. At least that would have had the advantage of being guaranteed not to be fun. Those things were completely useless anyway—or does anyone know someone who still has a working 8-inch drive? But no. I was a doer. A workhorse. A digital grafter. So, on to Phase 2 [0:51]: analysis. I sift through structures, parameters, routines, subroutines, libraries, and interfaces. I make meticulous notes and slowly begin to understand what the late colleague was thinking when he wrote certain routines. Phase 3 [1:07]: prototyping. I port all that ancient junk into a modern framework and code until my fingers bleed. AI helps me significantly with this. Sure, you have to explain to it three times that COBOL isn't a modern coffee machine, but once that’s done, things run smoothly. Phase 4 [1:23]: testing the prototype. This is where the AI’s true talent shines. It finds bugs the late developer probably didn't even know existed. Phase 5 [1:41]: the prototype becomes an essential component of the new, operational system. The devil is in the details here—especially with the interfaces—but thanks to artificial intelligence, it gets done faster these days than in the past. Phase 6 [3:18]: final testing. Everything’s fine. Phase 7 [4:02]: party! Champagne corks are popping, the documentation is being saved to the Confluence Cloud system, and a lucrative maintenance contract has been signed. Everyone is happy. A great project. It may have aged me by years, but it’s still wonderful to see the baby learn to walk. Phase 8 [6:17]: Damn! A new project! And the cycle begins all over again. I lean back, look at the list, and think: Well, there’s always tomorrow.