ABSTRACT. Surprising as it may seem, many of the early adopters of the object-oriented paradigm already face a number of problems typically encountered in large-scale legacy systems. Software engineers are now confronted with millions of lines of industrial source code, developed using object-oriented design methods and languages of the late 80s and early 90s. These systems exhibit a range of problems, effectively preventing them from satisfying the evolving requirements imposed by their customers.
This talk will share our knowledge concerning the reverse engineering (what is this code doing ?) and reengineering (how can we improve it ?) of object-oriented software systems. We will show you techniques and tools we have applied on real industrial OO systems and which have been documented in the form of reengineering patterns.
KEY WORDS. object-oriented software, re-engineering, reverse engineering, patterns
PRESENTER. Serge Demeyer is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He leads a research group investigating the theme of software reengineering, particularly reengineering in an object-oriented context. He is an active member of the corresponding research communities, serving in various conference organizations and program committees. He is author of a book Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns, which is a guide on how to reverse engineer legacy systems to understand their problems and then reengineer those systems to meet new demands [Demeyer&al2002].