Research Issues in the Renovation of Legacy Systems

. The goals of this tutorial are to: (i) give the reader a quick introduction to the field of software renovation as a whole; (ii) show that many techniques from compiler technology and formal methods can be applied; (iii) demonstrate that research should be driven by real-life, industrial, case studies; and (iv) indicate that many challenging problems are still unsolved. During the presentation of this turorial, demonstrations will be given of several of the case studies discussed here. Note: To appear in Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag, 1999. 1 Introduction Software renovation is using tomorrow's technology to bring yesterday's software to the level of today. In this paper, we provide an overview of this research area. We start (in this section) by exploring the need for software renovation. Moreover, we provide definitions of the basic terminology, and pointers to the most important literature. We then proceed to d..