how do you “reverse engineer” something?
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You carefully move through an environment and take stupidly over-cataloged and detailed notes about every aspect of it that can possibly be aligned to a name, taxonomy, or even concept.
Then, you go sit in a corner with all your information and try to figure out every pattern you recognize and can attribute to a task and then, you have parts from which to build a puzzle.
Now, your problem is that you do not know what the puzzle is or how it should look. This is generally the most entertaining/frustrating part because you have to try every combination you can calculate to figure out which even WORK; constantly reducing the number of pieces until the only available function that remains is X (the sum defined by its parts).
There are many methods and practices and religions on this stuff as there are grains of sand on a given beach. And entire industries have spun up to support the heavy lifting of things like rapid pattern identification and/or even just points of data handoff from which logically valid functions can be derived.
Ultimately, you can only reverse engineer something to the extent that you could engineer it in the first place. Any mimicry is obvious and all imitation, subordinate. Generally.
The domain of forensic analysis has presence in technology, but not usually at this level. No one much cares beyond being able to identify “their” source for purposes of litigation, which is why you don’t see 1,000 flavors of ‘reverse engineer guru 1.0’ out there. (There are some enterprise offerings that get closer than you might think… and I can see MS finally had the light bulb go off in this area, too… so I suspect interesting times ahead.)
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