From Code to Requirements: Agentic Reverse Engineering of Business Rules at Enterprise Scale

Abstract:Business requirements for enterprise software systems are rarely captured in structured form; the logic resides instead in source code, configuration files, and institutional memory. When these systems must be migrated, extended, or audited, the absence of formal requirements artifacts forces teams into expensive, knowledge-losing manual reverse engineering. This paper presents an agentic framework that autonomously generates Business Requirements Documents (bRDs) through reverse engineering of undocumented enterprise software. Seven specialized agents collaborate to discover user journeys, extract business rules, and synthesize a locked bRD from code, test suites, configuration, and available documentation, supported by static analysis tools, guided by embedded expert practitioner cognitive models, and overseen by human reviewers at controlled escalation points. Measured on actual execution traces across a real enterprise deployment, the framework generates comprehensive bRDs in under nine minutes per service, with extracted rules independently corroborated against real production defect records. In a comparable prior migration to the same target architecture, delivery required over two years; on the present programme the framework achieves a cost reduction exceeding 98% against a baseline derived from actual repository metrics using IFPUG complexity models and industry benchmark labor rates.

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.22719 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2609.22719v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.22719 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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