E-CARES research project: understanding complex legacy telecommunication systems

There are many reasons for reverse engineering or re-engineering legacy systems. To date, many approaches concerning the re-engineering of legacy systems have been made. The majority of these approaches deal with systems in the field of business applications. This paper describes the work performed for the E-CARES (Ericsson Communication ARchitecture for Embedded Systems) project so far. This project is concerned with understanding and re-structuring complex legacy telecommunication systems. In contrast to business applications, embedded systems (e.g. telecommunication systems) have additional requirements regarding fault tolerance, reliability, availability and response time. We found that these requirements have a significant impact on the software part of an embedded system. This has different characteristics concerning structuring, inter-program communication, etc. Therefore, an approach is presented that includes the usage of "dynamic" information, multi-level abstraction/visualization and user interaction to improve the understanding of telecommunication systems.