Iterative reengineering of legacy systems

During its life, a legacy system is subjected to many maintenance activities, which cause degradation of the quality of the system: When this degradation exceeds a critical threshold, the legacy system needs to be reengineered. In order to preserve the asset represented by the legacy system, the familiarity with it gained by the system's maintainers and users, and the continuity of execution of current operations during the reengineering process, the system needs to be reengineered gradually. Moreover, each program needs to be reengineered within a short period of time. The paper proposes a reengineering process model, which is applied to an in-use legacy system to confirm that the process satisfies previous requirements and to measure its effectiveness. The reengineered system replaced the legacy one to the satisfaction of all the stakeholders; the reengineering process also had a satisfactory impact on the quality of the system. Finally, this paper contributes to validate the cause-effect relationship between the reengineering process and overcoming the aging symptoms of a software system.