Measuring the physical attributes of something certainly counts as "reverse engineering". You might be thinking of clean room design [1], where one team does t

Measuring the physical attributes of something certainly counts as "reverse engineering". You might be thinking of clean room design [1], where one team does the reverse engineering and writes spec, and another team implements it from the spec. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design