Reengineering Structured Legacy System Documentation to UML Object-Oriented Artifacts

Abstract

The need for reengineering of software systems has dramatically increased as legacy systems are migrated to new platforms and rewritten in modern object-oriented languages. Although the de facto standard for describing object-oriented systems is the Unified Modeling Language (UML), many legacy systems have been documented using non-object-oriented structured analysis and design methods. Problems arise in the migration because non-object-oriented documentation is inherently not conducive to the development of object-oriented systems. This chapter presents a set of rules to automate the conversion of systems which were originally modeled using structured techniques to UML. The newly created UML documentation can then be used in developing an object-oriented equivalent system. The UML model may also be used by computer aided software engineering tools to implement a new system. The reengineering rules are tested on an example structured system to demonstrate their viability.