Balancing in reverse engineering and in object-oriented systems engineering to improve reusability and maintainability

Whenever a reverse engineering method is applied to an old software system, the results are mainly limited to its degree of automation. Additional domain knowledge via a human expert helps to overcome this limitation. Modernizing old procedural software for object-oriented reuse requires domain knowledge as well us a balancing of the recovered information. We have developed a reverse engineering method for a gradual transition of procedural programs to an object-oriented architecture based on those aspects. This paper describes the balancing of the various generated models in our reverse engineering method and discusses this balancing in comparison to the balancing process in conventional object-oriented systems development. We also point out the links between these two engineering approaches. Furthermore the advantages of our reverse engineering process for reusability as well as maintainability of old procedural software based on object-oriented concepts are indicated