Clues in the Schema: A Reverse Engineering Legacy Workshop for Testers

A practical 90-minute workshop for testers: how to design test cases for a legacy system for which documentation is missing or unreliable.

Participants master reverse engineering methodology (passive analysis of DDL, VCS, logs, and migrations; active analysis through SQL experiments, tracing, and API tools) and then work in groups to analyze four different legacy scenarios (e-commerce, airport, bank, warehouse) with intentionally introduced anomalies—hidden statuses, desynchronized calculated fields, and "blind" triggers.

The outcome of the workshop is not an essay or a set of hypotheses, but a ready-made set of tools and methods that can be immediately used.