A form driven object-oriented reverse engineering methodology

Abstract

Legacy applications are valuable assets that should be integrated into business systems in succeeding generations. In order to take advantage of these applications, progressive companies seek to improve current operations by reverse engineering. This paper proposes the form driven object-oriented reverse engineering (FORE) methodology by using forms to recover semantics of legacy applications. Forms are exceptionally easy to understand because of the user-oriented nature of the contents of business. This form driven object-oriented reverse engineering methodology consists of five different phases: form usage analysis, form object slicing, object structure modeling, scenario design, and model integration. Knowledge of the form structure and the user's interaction between legacy application is compiled to extract the design semantics. This application demonstrates the practical usability of the FORE methodology by transforming the resulting object models into well-known UML-based models. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.