retro-engineer

English

Etymology

retro- +‎ engineer

Verb

retro-engineer (third-person singular simple present retro-engineers, present participle retro-engineering, simple past and past participle retro-engineered)

1. (transitive) To reverse-engineer; to analyze (an existing item) in order to determine how to replicate it.
   • 2006, David O. Faulkner, Andrew Campbell, The Oxford Handbook of Strategy, →ISBN:

     On other occasions, where the technical basis for the initial entry cannot be defended, the second mover has the advantage, since it may well be less costly to retro-engineer a product than to have invented and innovated it.

   • 2010, Greg Castle, Remote Viewer: NSA Secret Agent, →ISBN, page 99:

     I suspected that's why I could so easily retro-engineer and re-invent their ultra-superior and advanced technology.

   • 2010, Mike W. Barr, Majician, →ISBN, page 39:

     He was an engineer, it was his responsibility to retro-engineer the saucer and its components, to find out how it could do what it had done.

   • 2010, Jonathan Maberry, The Dragon Factory, →ISBN:

     You can retro-engineer it. You look at a roomful of junk and you pay attention to what's lying on what, because that will eventually tell you what fell first.

   • 2011, Kenneth Royce Moore, Plato, Politics and a Practical Utopia, →ISBN:

     It may have been the case that Plato and the Academy were attempting to retro-engineer an ideal government based on existing models of past experiments in political reform.

   • 2012, Darrell Schweitzer, George R.R. Martin, James Morrow, Speaking of the Fantastic III: Interviews with Science Fiction Writers, →ISBN:

     If you can retro-engineer Sauron's ring, it isn't as magical anymore. It's a matter of the characters getting control of the material, as opposed to being in a situation or universe where this is not really possible.

2. (transitive) To develop (a process) by starting with the goal and working backwards to determine the steps needed to achieve it.
   • 2002, J. Leslie McKeown, Retaining Top Employees, →ISBN, page 175:

     Use the functional interaction with your best performers to retro-engineer a mission, values, and culture check-in.

   • 2009, Peter Hinssen, Jeroen Derynck, Business/IT Fusion, →ISBN:

     Set out the ambitions within a realistic time-frame, and re-engineer what you need to achieve in order to get there, taking into account possible interdependencies between different communication elements. This is altogether not very different from any IT project: define your goals, break it into smaller pieces, work out the interdependencies, and retro-engineer the goals into how you're going to get there.

   • 2013, Joshua Halberstam, Debra Gonsher, The Community College Guide, →ISBN:

     As we noted in the previous chapter, the best method for scheduling your time is to retro-engineer—that is, work backward.

3. (transitive) To revise or adapt (an existing item or process) in order to achieve a new purpose.
   • 2009, Graham Haughton, Philip Allmendinger, David Counsell, The New Spatial Planning, →ISBN:

     All of this makes some sense in terms of using the windfall brownfield site to retro-engineer a more mixed use form of development, but it does show up the shortcomings of the previous approach and the difficulties of achieving the new constraint policy.

   • 2014, John Oberdiek, Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts, →ISBN, page 394:

     And yet, when a teenager with known suicidal tendencies overdoses on easily available pills, many will feel fully entitled to demand recompense from the homeowner whose inadvertence so predictably in-fact and proximately contributed to the tragedy, and any effort to retro-engineer a precautionary rule is just disingenuous Monday morning quarterbacking.

   • 2015, Frances Cleary, Massimo Felici, Cyber Security and Privacy, →ISBN:

     It is much more difficult to retro-engineer at the end, security is all about how it is used and should be a driving force from concept commencement.

   • 2016, S. Poor, J. Schulman, Women and the Medieval Epic, →ISBN:

     Once Alexander is on the scene he must defend his mother's status continually in order to retro-engineer his own legitimacy.