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Abstract
A systematic legacy system modernizing approach represents a new approach for modernizing legacy systems. Systematic legacy system modernization has software reuse as an integral part of modernization. We have developed a modernization approach which uses software architecture reconstruction to find reusable components within the legacy system. The practice of software development and modernization continues to shift towards the reuse of components from legacy systems to handle the complexities of software development. Modernization of a legacy system requires reuse of software artefacts from legacy system to conserve the business rules and improve the system’s quality attributes. Software reuse is an integral part of our systematic legacy modernization approach. Software should be considered as an asset and reuse of these assets is essential to increase the return on the development costs.
Software reuse ranges from reuse of ideas to algorithms to any documents that are created during the software development life cycle. Software reuse has many potential benefits which include increased software quality, and decreased software development cost and time. Demands for lower software production and maintenance costs, faster delivery of systems and increased quality can only be met by widespread and systematic software reuse.
In spite of all these benefits software reuse adoption is not widespread in the software development communities. Software reuse cannot possibly become an engineering discipline so long as issues and concerns have not been clearly understood and dealt with. We have conducted two surveys to understand the issues and concerns of software reuse in the Conventional Software Engineering (CSE) Community and the Software Product Line (SPL) Community where reuse is an integral part of the product development. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of our surveys identified the critical factors which affect and inhibit software engineers and developers adopting software reuse.
Software reuse has been talked about in generic terms in software product lines. Though software reuse is a core concept in SPL it has however failed to become a standardized practice. The survey conducted on the SPL Community
investigates how software reuse is adopted in SPL so as to provide the necessary
degree of support for engineering software product line applications and to identify some of the issues and concerns in software reuse. The identified issues and concerns have helped us to understand the difference between software reuse in the CSE and SPL Communities. It has also given us an indication of how both communities can learn good software reuse practices from each other in order to develop a common software reuse process. Based on the outcome of our surveys we have developed a systematic software reuse process, called the Knowledge Based Software Reuse (KBSR) Process, which incorporates a Repository of reusable software assets to build a systematic legacy system modernization approach. Being able to reuse software artefacts, be it software requirement specification, design, or code, would greatly enhance software productivity and reliability. All of these software artefacts can go in the Knowledge Based Software Reuse Repository and be candidates for reuse.