Lessons from a domain-based reengineering effort

The author presents the lessons and insights learned from a domain-centered reengineering effort. Using a method developed in a previous work, he sets about trying to understand and convert a complete legacy system from COBOL to an executable domain model. His work suggests that a domain-based approach is very promising but a number of issues need to be better understood. Among these are questions about domain completeness, scoping, interleaving and evolution; concept matching at the granularity of both the program architecture and details of the source code; thoroughness and representation of the legacy program coverage, as well as the problems inherent to the transition of a multi-program system. He discusses these issues in details using examples. Implications on future work in the area are suggested.