The implications of non-functional requirements for the reengineering of legacy code

The paper describes the process whereby we investigate the implementation of non-functional requirements and their implications on the reengineering process. The authors' work has so far concentrated on the identification of reusable units from existing legacy systems. However, the results from their approaches so far have found that the functionality is difficult to separate into separate units. They have found that certain aspects of the code tend to hold the units together. They propose that these aspects be the implementation of non-functional requirements, and, that if these aspects can be filtered out, larger and more reusable object would be obtained through the use of reuse reengineering approaches. The paper describes the process by which they identify the non-functional requirements and evaluates the usefulness of the process through a number of case studies.