Using an enabling technology to reengineer legacy systems

"Reengineering a major line-of-business system can be likened to changing a tire on a moving vehicle." Intro • Proliferation of CASE tools in the last 10 years • Reengineering tool proliferation has been minimal • Automated support for reengineering is worse-especially when we talk about transforming code to new functionality. • Largest problem in reengineering tools is the lack of customizability • Article describes experience in applying a new enabling technology to automate reengineering of a legacy MIS system. • Project lasted 4 ½ months • Developed and alpha-tested a 40KLOC COBOL application • Previous experience indicated > 20 man-weeks to reengineer a 15KLOC program by hand, this project reduced that effort to 4 man hours Body • This paper describes the project in somewhat boring detail, discussing the following areas: • The Boeing Payroll Modularization Project-a description of the project and its management and processes. • The Critical Modularization Tasks-a description of the process used to make modularization decisions • Technical Approach-how they used the technology to build a custom reengineering environment. • Software Refinery-a description of the reengineering tool development environment • Using the Modularization Tool-a description of the environment and an example of its application to the problem • Results-a description of the end results of the project. No general conclusions were drawn. • Future Development-a description of then future areas in which Boeing planned to use the tools.