Iterative reengineering of legacy systems

Abstract

During its life, a legacy system is subjected to many maintenance activities, which cause degradation of the quality of the system: When this degradation exceeds a critical threshold, the legacy system needs to be reengineered. In order to preserve the asset represented by the legacy system, the familiarity with it gained by the system's maintainers and users, and the continuity of execution of current operations during the reengineering process, the system needs to be reengineered gradually. Moreover, each program needs to be reengineered within a short period of time. The paper proposes a reengineering process model, which is applied to an in-use legacy system to confirm that the process satisfies previous requirements and to measure its effectiveness. The reengineered system replaced the legacy one to the satisfaction of all the stakeholders; the reengineering process also had a satisfactory impact on the quality of the system. Finally, this paper contributes to validate the cause-effect relationship between the reengineering process and overcoming the aging symptoms of a software system.

Using Reverse Engineering to Define a Domain Model

“…The reverse engineering process was very important in the past for the maintenance of legacy systems (Bianchi, Caivano, Marengo & Visaggio, 2003) (Hassan, Qamar, Hassan & Waqas, 2015) (Sneed, 1995). Nowadays this process is very useful in domain engineering processes that aim to define the commonality and the variability of the software product line (Linden Schmid and Rommes, 2007) (Pohl, Blöckle & van Der Linden, 2005).…”

A Systematic Mapping Study on Legacy System Modernization

“…Therefore, as discussed in [1,2,3], modernization can be defined as the evolution of systems towards new business requirements of the organizations, involving new functionalities, error correction, or technological updates. In this sense, many theories have been suggested in the literature, as discussed below.…”

Reengineering component-based software systems with Archimetrix

“…Bianchi et al [9] present a process to iteratively reengineer a complete system without shutting it down. The process supports the iterative migration of functionality and data.…”

“…We detail on individual steps of Archimetrix in Sects. [5][6][7][8][9]. After presenting our evaluation results in Sect.…”