Industrial experience in automating software re-engineering

Abstract

The special problems of software re-engineering and technologies and approaches that specifically address these re-engineering problems are considered. Particular attention is given to approaches for analyzing and abstracting the functionality of old code, converting software to work with new languages or dialects, translating large systems, defining appropriate roles for the user of highly automated tools, and identifying the automatable steps in a large-scale project to re-engineer assembly language code. An attempt is made to indicate on the basis of actual experience what aspects of the re-engineering process seem to be most amenable to automation and what productivity gains can be expected.<>