Reengineering at the Architectural Level : Transformation of Legacy Systems

In this paper, we put forward a methodology for reengineering the architecture of a legacy software system. The proposed approach is not restricted to any specific source and target architectures, or programming language. It consists in (1) achieving a representation of the source code through its categorization and structuring, (2) transforming it into the new intended architecture, and (3) generating the code for the target platform. First, the code is categorized according to its purpose by pre-defined rules and represented as a model that is an instance of a type graph. Then, this representation is transformed into the intended target architectural paradigm using graph transformation techniques. The generation of the target code is not covered in this report but will be studied in the near future. The approach attempts to address problems that are repeatedly encountered in legacy reengineering industry projects.

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