Reengineering digital systems

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2003

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.

Computer Technology has been in existence for many years; as time goes on there is an increasing number of outdated systems. Legacy System Reengineering has become a critical effort in many technology organizations. Several reengineering models have been developed, such as the Byrne Model and the Evolutional Model. These models have addressed some of the issues in the reengineering process, but other issues remain. This paper presents a dual-spiral reengineering model, which performs as a cyclic approach, and addresses issues that those models do not, making the reengineering process more successful. This model has been successfully applied to a legacy financial software system reengineering effort.

Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice, 2006

Product lines are a promising approach to improve conceptually the productivity of the software development process and thus to reduce both the cost and time of developing and maintaining increasingly complex systems. An important issue in the adoption of the product-line approach is the migration of legacy software components, which have not been designed for reuse, systematically into reusable product-line components. This article describes activities performed to improve systematically the design and implementation of an existing software component in order to reuse it in a software product line. The activities are embedded in the application of Fraunhofer PuLSE TM -DSSA-an approach for defining domain-specific software architectures (DSSA) and product-line architectures. The component under investigation is the so-called Image Memory Handler (IMH), which is used in Ricoh's current products of office appliances such as copier machines, printers, and multi-functional peripherals. It is responsible for controlling memory usage and compressing and decompressing image data. Improvement of both the component's design and implementation are based on a systematic analysis and focused on increasing maintainability and reusability and hence suitability for use in a product line. As a result of the analysis and refactoring activities, the documentation and implementation of the component has been considerably improved as shown by quantitative data collected at the end of the activities. Despite a number of changes to the code, the external behavior of the component has been preserved without significantly affecting the performance.

2004

1998

In this report, we present an overview of the existing software re-engineering process and its related concepts.We also classify existing software reuse techniques and we propose how to integrate such techniques into thesoftware re-engineering process by following a component-based approach. In addition, we demonstrate how ourmethodology can be applied on a client-server legacy system.Keywords: Re-engineering, Reverse Engineering, Reuse, Components, Software Engineering.1 Introduction...

1996

Abstract This paper describes a unifying structure for the full spectrum of activities that constitute a reengineering project. Part of the framework's" value added" is its usefulness as a reference model for planning a reengineering project and for identifying, describing, understanding, assessing, or evaluating the technical, managerial, and project-related factors that characterize reengineering efforts. The framework can serve as a tool for planning, implementing, and assessing reengineering projects.

A book chapter in Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Fifth Edition, edited by Mehdi Khosrow-Pour D.B.A., IGI Global, 2021, pp. 1214-1230., 2021

Software reengineering is an important area of the software engineering. The quest to maintain and understand operational legacy systems has always been a challenge for software practitioners. This chapter presents a compilation of notions and techniques covering major areas namely, reverse engineering, program understanding, software maintenance, migration and evolving. Our objective is not to create new terms, but to introduce the terms already in use with different perspectives.

The Engineering Economist, 2006

Many technologies have lifecycles that are shorter than the lifecycle of the product they are in. Lifecycle mismatches caused by the obsolescence of technology (and particularly the obsolescence of electronic parts) results in high sustainment costs for long field life systems, e.g., avionics and military systems. This paper presents a methodology for performing optimum design refresh planning for sustainment-dominated electronic systems based on forecasted technology obsolescence and a mix of obsolescence mitigation approaches ranging from lifetime buys to part substitution. The methodology minimizes the lifecycle cost by determining the optimum combination of design refresh schedule for the system (i.e., when to design refresh) and the design refresh content for each of the scheduled design refreshes. The analysis methodology can be used to generate application-specific economic justifications for design refresh approaches to obsolescence management.

1994

This paper reports on a multi-tool commercial/military environment combining software Domain Analysis techniques with Reusable Software and Reengineering of Legacy Software. It is based on the development of a military version for the Department of Defense (DOD). The integrated tools in the military version are: Software Specification Assistant (SSA) and Software Reengineering Environment (SRE), developed by Computer Command and Control Company (CCCC) for Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) and Joint Logistics Commanders (JLC), and the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) STARS Software Engineering Environment (SEE) developed by Boeing for NAVAIR PMA 205. The paper describes transitioning these integrated tools to commercial use. There is a critical need for the transition for the following reasons: First, to date, 70 percent of programmers' time is applied to software maintenance. The work of these users has not been facilitated by existing tools. The addition of Software Re...

The paper presents the difficulties that companies from industrial and service sector business face in ord e r to implement new technologies such as CAD/CAM/CAE, CNC and CIM, analyses the basic interrelated factors that are crucial for the successful application of such innovative techniques and finally develops an integrated reengineering approach.