From legacy to component: Software renovation in three steps
Arie van Deursen, B. Elsinga, Paul Klint, R. Tolido · 2000
The major challenge for future business operations is to align changing business goals and changing technologies, while preserving the assets that are hidden in the legacy systems supporting today’s business operations. In this paper we formulate the main questions system renovation has to solve, and we give a comprehensive overview of techniques and approaches. We discuss the analysis and transformation of legacy systems and also describe how domain engineering can help to identify reusable domain knowledge. By stressing the need for cooperation between renovated software and new software we naturally arrive at the need for component-based approaches and coordination architectures that define the cooperation between old and new components. We present a three step approach to system renovation: find components, global restructuring, and renovate per component. The necessary techniques for analysis, transformation, and regeneration of legacy systems are also discussed. The paper concludes with a description of domain engineering and domain-specific languages as viable techniques for the structuring and reuse of the application domain knowledge that is embedded in legacy systems.