Mining Components From Legacy Systems Through Reverse Engineering

Abstract

Legacy systems are increasingly acknowledged as major problems for most large corporations. Re-engineering is probably the best way to solve the problem. A typical component-based re-engineering process is: to use reverse engineering methodology to expose components from the existing system, to use repository to store and manage the components, then to restructure the new system, and to integrate the new system with reusable generic components and new-produced components by forward engineering. In our approach reusable components are mined from legacy systems, and made potentially reusable. New systems can be made by the integration of both mined and newly build components. The problem to be studied is an efficient and feasible way to extract components from the legacy systems. In this paper, component is explicitly defined and a sound method is proposed, detailed algorism is described with a case study.