Reasons For Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering is a process to understand how a particular product works, and learn the ideas and technologies used in developing that product.The process of duplicating an existing component, subassembly, or product, without the aid of drawings, documentation, or computer model. Reverse engineering can be viewed as the process of analyzing a system to: Identify the system's components and their interrelationships, create representations of the system in another form or a higher level of abstraction and create the physical representation of that system.

Reverse engineering is very common in such diverse fields as software engineering, entertainment, automotive, consumer products, microchips, chemicals, electronics, and mechanical designs.

Rather than simply copying everything about the product, adopting an ethical approach to learn the technology and design to implement on an altogether different product development will complement the use of reverse engineering technique and will also inspire innovation. Following are other reasons for reverse engineering: some bad features of a product need to be designed out. For example, excessive wear might indicate where a product should be improved. Reverse engineering is to explore new avenues to improve product performance and features and to gain competitive benchmarking methods to understand competitor's products and develop better products. Reverse engineering should be utilized to gauge the performance and quality of the competitor products as per the standards marketed and advertised. This helps in identifying voids in the products that can be utilized as an inspiration to develop new ones that meets or exceeds the performance quality. Moreover it helps to update obsolete materials or antiquated manufacturing processes with more current, less-expensive

Before attempting reverse engineering, a well-planned life-cycle analysis and cost/benefit analysis should be conducted to justify the reverse engineering projects. Reverse engineering is typically cost effective only if the items to be reverse engineered reflect a high investment or will be reproduced in large quantities. Reverse engineering of a part may be attempted even if it is not cost effective, if the part is absolutely required and is mission-critical to a system. It can be said that reverse engineering begins with the product and works through the design process in the opposite direction to arrive at a product definition statement (PDS). In doing so, it uncovers as much information as possible about the design ideas that were used to produce a particular