Decomposing legacy programs: a first step towards migrating to client-server platforms

We propose an approach to program decomposition as a preliminary step for the migration of legacy systems. A program slicing algorithm is defined to identify the statements implementing the user interface component. An interactive re-engineering tool is also presented that supports the software engineer in the comprehension of the source code during the decomposition of a program. The focus of this paper is on the partition of a legacy system, while issues related to the re-engineering, encapsulation, and wrapping of the legacy components and to the definition of the middleware layer through which they communicate are not tackled