Towards the automatic discovery of platform transformation templates of legacy object-oriented systems

Abstract

Software modernization is needed to perform the evolution of a system when conventional practices can no longer achieve the desired evolution goal. In their initiative called architecture-driven modernization (ADM), the Object Management Group proposes to use MDA to perform this modernization. However, ADM needs new tools and techniques to migrate systems developed on a non-model-driven environment to a model-driven environment. One challenge to enable this migration is the discovery of a platform description model (PDM) from the implementation of a system. In this paper, we propose an approach to discover a view of the PDM from an object-oriented system source code. This view is given as a set of transformation templates parameterizing the source code of the system's implementation platform and expressed in the QVT language. The approach uses different analysis techniques and was validated on several systems written in Java and gives good results for a number of them.