spawn.london case study

Legacy ATE Recovery & Reverse Engineering

Brought in to recover an automatic test equipment programme for Safran — a global leader in aerospace, defence and security — where critical test capability depended on ageing legacy systems.

Aerospace Defence Security Automatic Test Equipment Legacy Systems Reverse Engineering Project Recovery
Safran - aerospace, defence and security

The Challenge

Critical automatic test equipment depended on legacy systems whose original tooling, documentation and institutional knowledge had eroded over time.

When the systems that validate flight-critical hardware are themselves legacy, every hour without recovery increases risk. The programme needed compliant, commercial recovery before it was too late — not a ground-up rewrite.

What We Did

Working from the running equipment back to first principles - so the recovered systems could be validated against their true requirements rather than assumptions.

Reverse Engineering of Legacy Systems

Working from the live hardware and code back to a clear understanding of how each element behaved and why — recovering knowledge the available documentation no longer held.

Legacy CodeHardware InterfacesSystem Behaviour

Specification Analysis

Detailed reading of the original specifications, reconciling what was documented against what had actually been built — establishing a trusted baseline for validation.

Original SpecsGap AnalysisValidation Baseline

Recovery Within Constraints

Delivery planned around the programme’s real commercial position — remaining budget, hard targets and stakeholder expectations — not an idealised restart.

Budget AwareTarget DrivenStakeholder Aligned

A critical programme going off course?

We recover legacy and distressed projects commercially - analysing what exists, reconciling it against specification, and delivering within the budget that remains. Let’s talk before it’s too late.

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