Object-oriented reengineering patterns

The rapid growth of object-oriented development over the past twenty years has given rise to many object-oriented systems that are large, complex and hard to maintain. These systems exhibit a range of problems, effectively preventing them from satisfying the evolving requirements imposed by their customers. In our paper, we address problem of understanding and reengineering such object-oriented legacy systems. The material is presented as a set of "reengineering patterns" - recurring solutions that experts apply while reengineering and maintaining object-oriented systems. The patterns distill successful techniques in planning a reengineering project, reverse-engineering, problem detection, migration strategies and software redesign. The principles and techniques described have been observed and validated in a number of industrial projects, and reflect best practice in object-oriented reengineering.