In the introduction to this paper we are told that the objective of a design recovery system is to “reproduce all of the information for a person to fully understand what a program does, how it does it, why it does it, and so forth.” The reader who expects some valuable insight into this objective will be disappointed.

The first half of the paper is a rudimentary discussion of design and design recovery. The second half is taken up with a high-level discussion of a model-based design recovery system. Desire, a prototype of this system, is introduced at this point. Desire is a hypertext-based system very similar to earlier work on reverse engineering and re-engineering systems, in which “hot-links” are maintained between the documentation, the source code, and other parts of the system.

Overall, this paper adds little to our understanding of design recovery for maintenance and reuse. At best it is a high-level description of the Desire prototype.