Harvesting Software Systems for MDA-Based Reengineering

In this paper we report on a feasibility study in reengineering legacy systems towards a model-driven architecture (MDA). Steps in our approach consist of (1) parsing the source code of the legacy system according to a grammar; (2) mapping the abstract syntax trees thus obtained to a grammar model that is defined in the Meta-Object Facility (MOF); (3) using model to model (M2M) transformations to turn the grammar model into a generic meta-model, called Generic-AST, in which information about software systems can be stored in a language-independent way; (4) mapping the GenericAST models, again using M2M transformations, to UML models that can be either used for code generation or for documentation purposes. The steps have been implemented in a prototype model harvesting tool that is based on Arc-Styler, the MDA environment provided by Interactive Objects. Our paper presents this approach, and reports on our experiences in applying the method to a 178 KLOC production system from the insurance domain written in PL/SQL.