Object-oriented model refinement technique in software reengineering

Software reengineering for object-oriented rearchitecturing offers an exciting opportunity in migrating old legacy systems to evolvable systems in a disciplined manner. In the twofold-strategy software reengineering for object-oriented rearchitecturing, one of the problems to be solved is to derive a proper object-oriented model from the output of reverse engineering and the output of forward engineering. In general, the outputs of forward and reverse engineering can be inconsistent in their abstract levels, the amount of design information, naming conventions, and structures. In this paper we present an Object-oriented model Refinement Technique (ORT) to build a final object model in the twofold-strategy software reengineering. We first organize the information gained from reverse engineering into specification information tree, and then compare the entities in the specification information tree with the information from forward engineering using tree-structured data dictionary to produce the final model. We demonstrate the usability of ORT by an example.