Reverse-engineering is inherently an inductive process, whereby you have to make educated guesses as to what the model is, iteratively.

Samba is a great example of how this is necessarily an imperfect model, and definitely not an optimal process:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=488089

Development as theory-building is intended as a metaphor to understand the impact of the collaborative mental model that is created as part of any complex system, and the losses incurred when this mechanism is not appreciated.