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Reversa is a multi-agent reverse documentation engineering framework that converts legacy codebases into traceable opera
Reversa is a multi-agent reverse documentation engineering framework that converts legacy codebases into traceable operational specifications to provide reliable context for AI coding agents.
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Reversa: A Reverse Documentation Engineering Framework for Converting Legacy Software into Operational Specifications for AI Agents
Legacy systems concentrate business rules, architectural decisions, and operational exceptions that often remain implicit in code, data, configuration, and
maintenance practices. At the same time, language-model-based coding agents depend on reliable context, correctness criteria, and behavioral contracts to
modify real systems with lower risk. This paper presents Reversa, a reverse documentation engineering framework for converting legacy software into
traceable operational specifications for AI agents. Reversa organizes this process as a multi-agent pipeline: specialized agents map the project surface,
analyze modules, extract implicit rules, synthesize architecture, write unit-level specifications, and review generated claims. The proposal emphasizes
three mechanisms: traceability between code and specification, explicit confidence marking, and preservation of gaps for human validation. The framework is
distributed as a Node.js CLI, installs skills across multiple agent engines, and uses a SHA-256 manifest to preserve modified files during update or
uninstall operations. In addition to the architectural description, we report an exploratory case study on migrating an ATM from COBOL to Go, in which the
pipeline produced 517 claims classified by an internal confidence index, 10 registered gaps, 53 Gherkin parity scenarios, and a reconstruction plan with 9
of 11 tasks completed at inventory time. Final parity validation and cutover were not completed in this