Incremental quality driven software migration to object oriented systems

In the context of software maintenance, legacy software systems are continuously re-engineered in order to correct errors, provide new functionality, or port them into modern platforms. However, software re-engineering activities should not occur in a vacuum, and it is important to incorporate non-functional requirements as part of the re-engineering process. This work presents an incremental reengineering framework that allows for quality requirements to be modeled as soft-goals, and transformations to be applied selectively towards achieving specific quality requirements for the target system. Moreover, to deal with large software systems, a system can be decomposed into a collection of smaller clusters. The reengineering framework can be applied incrementally to each of these clusters and results are assembled to produce the final system. Using the theory presented We developed a reengineering toolkit to automatically migrate procedural systems to object oriented platforms. We used the toolkit to migrate a number of open source systems including Apache, Bash and Clips. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness, usefulness, and scalability of our proposed incremental quality driven migration framework.