Software Development - Making Legacy Systems Productive Software Re Engineering

By Author: btucker
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Heritage software systems are no more effective in the fast innovative world of information & technology. Companies which are serving the community for the last several years are usually faces the problems to match with the existing more developed technological environment. Best solution for this problem is Software re-engineering.

Software re-engineering is improving the existing software which can be easily understandable, control and used as a new or fresh. In the process of re-engineering of the software system, software engineers do the examination, analysis and alteration of ongoing (old) software system to reconstruct it in the new type and ensuring the new type. There are several other processes also included by the engineers in the software re-engineering which completes the whole process such as reverse engineering, re-documentation, restructuring, translation, and forward engineering. The main goal of the software engineers in this process is to understand completely existing software's design, specifications, implementation ...
... and then to re-implement it to improve the old system's functionality and performance. Generally software engineer's objective in this process is to first maintain the existing functionality, then prepare the existing (old) system for the changes and finally add fresh technology.

The main challenge in front of software engineers who performs the re-engineering for the any big companies or corporations is to maintain the existing functionality or without disturbing the ongoing process, implementing new technology. Generally they make few objectives to perform it in more systematic and disciplined way such as preparation for improving functionality, enhance maintainability, migration (such as new hardware platform, language or operating system), reliability of re-engineered system.

In the field of re-engineering the software systems professionals use to follow few approaches, to perform the process according to the real conditions of the existing system, for instance some systems are very old which needs to change completely and some may be required little upgrade technology for good performance. Commonly there three kinds of approaches applied by the professional engineers for the re-engineering of software systems such as Big Bang approach, Incremental approach, Evolutionary approach.

As depending on the requirement of the companies or organizations for the re-engineering of their software systems, the very first kind of approach is Big Bang, using this approach replaces the whole software system with totally new software system, as this approach is preferred to solve the immediate problems. Following the incremental approach engineers use to divide the existing software system in certain sections for re- engineering and add incrementally new versions. In the Evolutionary approach software system is divided in the sections like incremental approach and each section is replaced with fresh re-engineered section, important is that engineers replace sections according to functionality of sections.

In the process of software re-engineering professionals use to follow a systematic way such as fix goal, objectives, approaches for converting the existing software systems into productive for the organizations.