Creating reusable software component from object-oriented legacy system through reverse engineering

Abstract

Due to the constant change in technology, lack of standardization, difficulties of changes and absence of distributed architecture, the business value of legacy systems have become weaker. We cannot undermine the importance of legacy systems because some of their functions are too valuable to be discarded and too expensive to reproduce. The software industry and researchers have recently paid more attention towards the component based software development to enhance the productivity and accelerate time to market. Instead of re-implementing the business critical applications with-in time and resource constraints, the best option is Software Reengineering (SRE) with effective design and architecture which can make the system better for reusability and maintainability. The main motive behind the reengineering is integrating the legacy system with emerging technologies. To achieve these goals, we have proposed a systematic and concrete model named as Component Oriented Reverse Engineering (CORE). It aims to identify and develop reusable software components. By using the reverse engineering techniques; we can extract architectural information and services from legacy system and later on convert these services into components. © JOT, 2009.