Which programming analysis approach helps identify system components and their relationships?

Reverse engineering is a crucial programming analysis approach that allows developers to deconstruct and analyze existing systems. By examining the software's code, architecture, and documentation, teams can uncover the relationships and interactions between various system components.

One of the primary purposes of reverse engineering is to understand legacy systems that may lack adequate documentation or where the original development team is no longer available. This approach facilitates the identification of how different parts of a program work together, helping engineers to recreate designs, improve functionality, or migrate systems to new platforms or languages.

In contrast, while static analysis reviews code without executing it to check for vulnerabilities or code quality, it does not inherently identify relationships between components in the same way reverse engineering does. Dynamic analysis examines the program while it is running to understand behaviors and performance but is limited to execution scenarios. Data mining focuses on extracting patterns and knowledge from large datasets, which does not directly pertain to system architecture or component relationships.