Integration of analysis and redesign activities in information system reengineering

Abstract

Emerging key technologies like the World Wide Web, object-orientation, and distributed computing enable new applications, e.g., in the area of electronic commerce, management information systems, and decision support systems. Today, many companies face the problem that they have to reengineer pre-existing information systems to take advantage of these technologies. Various computer-aided reengineering tools have been developed to reduce the complexity of the reengineering task. However a major limitation of current approaches is that they impose a strictly phase-oriented waterfall-type reengineering process, without the support for iterations. Still, such iterations often occur in real world examples, e.g., when additional knowledge about the legacy system becomes available or when the legacy system is modified during the migration process. We present an approach to incremental consistency management that allows to overcome this limitation by integrating reverse and forward engineering activities in an intertwined process. The described mechanism is based on a formalization of redesign transformations by graph rewriting rules and has been implemented in the Varlet reengineering environment.