An Automated Approach to Componentization of Java Source Code

Component migration is an effective way for legacy software systems reuse and evolution. The process of component migration for legacy systems involves two major phases: identifying reusable components, and adapting source code to the newly identified component-based system architecture, that is, componentization. Our work concerns the latter phase. In this paper, focusing on improving reusability and extensibility of legacy software systems, we proposed an automated approach to migrating legacy software systems into component-based systems with refined target system architecture. We proposed three policies for componentization: information hiding policy, common class extraction policy and component creation policy. A tool called JCMT is developed to perform componentization and generate executable software artifacts. We also presented a case study to demonstrate that the proposed approach and the tool JCMT can be used efficiently and cost-effectively for organizations maintaining legacy systems.