Case study in migration to object-oriented system structure using design transformation methods

Procedural programming languages are being used extensively in the software industry for a wide range of applications. Most of the old procedural programs used today may not have any documentation which could be used in maintenance processes. There has been a paradigm shift towards object oriented design and programming, from algorithmic decomposition, structured design, and procedural implementation. Hence, there is a growing need to restructure old programs which have a poor architecture during evolutionary processes. It is more economic to restructure existing software into object oriented topology by identifying objects within the subject system than to redesign software starting from scratch. Object identification relies upon program analysis and a study of intercomponent relationships and dependencies. Researchers in re-engineering have proposed some guidelines to identify objects from within the subject systems. Design transformation is the first step in reengineering existing programs, which can be followed by program translation methods to transform a procedural program into the newly identified structure. The paper reports the results of the application of three object identification methods on a sample procedural program. Secondly it provides a design of a system for program component storage and object identification