Mining legacy systems for business components: an architecture for an integrated toolkit

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) is emerging as the new paradigm for the development of new software. The advantages of a component-based approach to software development are well known within the software community, with a growing technology base dedicated to its realisation. Unfortunately, the vast majority of software development is concerned with the maintenance and evolution of legacy systems, not the development of new systems. Fortunately work has begun on ways to extend the life of legacy assets using CBSE techniques and, more importantly, on offering organisations a mechanism for gradually migrating their legacy functionality to modern component-based environments.. This paper builds upon that work by describing a toolkit architecture in the context of a step-by-step method for mining business components from legacy systems. This architecture forms the basis of a toolkit under development that aims to make the mining of business components practicable.