The Story of Re-engineering 350,000 Lines of FORTRAN Code

Abstract This paper describes a case study to determine whether computer-aided prototyping techniques provide a cost-effective means for re-engineering legacy software. The case study consists of developing a high-level modular architecture for the existing US Army Janus combat simulation system, and validating the architecture via an executable prototype using the Computer Aided Prototyping System (CAPS), a research tool developed at the Naval Postgraduate School. The case study showed that prototyping can be a valuable aid in re-engineering of legacy systems, particularly in cases where radical changes to system conceptualization and software structure are needed. The CAPS system enabled us to do this with a minimal amount of coding effort.