Creating a research infrastructure for reengineering

The field of software reengineering is growing rapidly in response to the critical need that exists in the software industry for technology to support legacy system maintenance and evolutionary development of new systems. As the field matures, it is essential to achieve coherence across the many research efforts that are underway to develop technology to support reengineering. In particular; for reengineering research to have an impact on actual reengineering practice, we need to achieve a consensus on the fundamental goals and products of reengineering research and how they relate to practitioners' needs, how to assess value and evaluate progress in the field, and how to facilitate communication among researchers and, more importantly between researchers and practitioners. This paper proposes an infrastructure for drawing together work in the field, to coordinate and leverage our efforts and to encourage measurable progress.