In the standard software-engineering taxonomy, design recovery from source…

Concept

Software reverse engineering analyzes an existing system to identify its components and relationships and to create representations at the same or a higher level of abstraction.

Design recovery is a reverse-engineering activity that adds domain knowledge, external information, and reasoning to reconstruct design abstractions.

Application

Here, the activity starts with implementation-level source code and reconstructs a higher-level design representation. The standard taxonomy calls this movement from an existing implementation to a higher-level representation reverse engineering and identifies design recovery as one of its forms.

Contrast

• Re-engineering includes examining and then modifying an existing system to reconstitute it in a new or improved form.

• Software reuse applies an existing component, design, or other asset in another development or maintenance task.

• The combined statement mixes an examination process, a transformation process, and an asset-use practice instead of naming the taxonomy category of design recovery.

Cross-check

Redocumentation is also placed under reverse engineering because it creates another representation of an existing system; adding system transformation would expand the broader effort to re-engineering. This confirms the category asked here.

Result

Therefore, design recovery from source code is performed during reverse engineering.