Bridging legacy systems to model driven architecture

Abstract

System evolution can be achieved effectively from architectural point of view, and one of the most exciting outcomes of those efforts on software architecture is OMG' Model Driven Architecture (MDA) which aims at a unified framework for system evolution targeting middleware-based modern distributed system. The advance of technologies in software design and implementation, however, cannot completely avoid the need for deep understanding of legacy systems for evolution. We are still stuck with incomplete high abstraction views when evolving the legacy systems. This paper presents an approach to bridging legacy systems to MDA, which has three contributions: a suitable architecture description language for architecture recovery, the relevant abstraction rules and the integration of reverse engineering with MDA.