An approach to system verification is described in whichdesign artefacts produced during forward engineering areautomatically compared to corresponding artefactsproduced during reverse engineering. The goal is toautomatically determine if an implementation isconsistent with the original design. In the systemdescribed, XML Metadata Interchange (XMI)representations of Unified Modelling Language (UML)class diagrams are recovered from compiled Java classfiles. These are automatically compared with thecorresponding diagrams produced during forwardengineering by software engineers using CASE tools.Examples are provided in which reversed engineeredUML class diagrams differ from those produced duringforward engineering but are still faithful to the originaldesign intent. Such differences are often due to moreabstract system representations being captured in forwardengineered design artefacts, the inclusion of designattributes and annotations that are not retained in the finalimplementation, and issues associated with the use ofweakly typed containers. In other cases, differencesindicate a deviation from the intended design. It is thislatter type of difference that this paper is particularlyinterested in identifying. We advocate that an automatedcomparison of forward and reverse engineering artefactsshould be performed during formal code inspectionpreparation and used to guide human review of theidentified differences.

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