Scaffolding for software renovation

We discuss an approach that explores the use of scaffolding of source code to facilitate its renovation. We show that scaffolding is a useful paradigm for software renovation. We designed syntax and semantics for scaffolding, that enables all relevant applications of scaffolding. The automatic generation of extensions to a normal grammar, so that the resulting extension grammar can parse code with scaffolding, is discussed. We used the scaffolding paradigm itself to implement the generation process, thereby showing that our approach towards scaffolding is also useful in software development. Finally, we discuss real-world applications of scaffolding for software renovation, in both our own work and work from people in the reengineering IT industry.