An Iterative Reengineering Process Applying Test-Driven Development and Reverse Engineering Patterns

Abstract. Nowadays, software technology is evolving quickly and therefore software systems which have been built upon some technologies are deprecated even before being released and used. Thus, software systems are in constant evolution in order to adapt to current technologies as well as users’ needs. An approach to revitalize software systems that have already been released is reengineering. In this paper, we propose an iterative reengineering approach that uses reverse engineering patterns and test-driven development to cope with issues involved in migrating from a legacy system to an equivalent software system implemented in more recent technologies. As a preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach, we contrasted it with an ad-hoc approach during the reengineering of a legacy system from Smalltalk to Java. The results gathered during the case study suggest that our approach produces higher-quality code and the information obtained by means of applying reverse engineering patterns is very accurate and cost-effective