Abstract
Legacy systems are large applications which are significant in performing daily organizational operations and cannot be upgraded easily especially in the absence of architectural and design documentation. Software modernization is an emerging field of software engineering, which transforms the legacy systems into new one according to the specified requirements of stakeholders. It mainly deals with improving the architecture, features, rules and data sources of existing system. It always remained a challenging task to achieve high-level representation of legacy systems. In order to achieve this high-level representation, Reverse Engineering (RE) plays an integral role. The issues of traditional RE are overcome with the help of Model Driven Reverse Engineering (MDRE) such as it generates model-based view of the legacy systems, which is comprehensible and easy to understand for practitioners. MDRE is an active research area but it provides limited tool support to extract and model both structural and behavioral aspects of legacy systems. In this paper, a novel MDRE framework named as “Source to Model Framework (Src2MoF)”is proposed to generate Unified Modeling Language (UML) structural (class) and behavioral (activity) diagrams from the Java source code. Src2MoF is based on the principles of Model Driven Engineering (MDE), which use models as first-class citizens alleviating the complexity of software systems. The contributions of this paper are as follows; first, an Intermediate Model Discoverer (IMD) is developed using source code parser to get the intermediate representation of the system from the existing Java code. Second, an open source transformation engine named “UML model generator” is implemented using Java, which takes these intermediate models as input, and produce high-level UML models of the subject legacy system. Finally, the two benchmark case studies are presented to depict the relevance and usability of Src2MoF.
Highlights
Legacy systems are used by many organizations because they execute critical operations and are non-negligible
By applying Reverse Engineering (RE), it helps the practitioners to deal with legacy systems in following manner: 1) It helps to understand the key issues of an unsuccessful design and subsequently improve the design
Model Driven Reverse Engineering (MDRE) AND Unified Modeling Language (UML) DIAGRAMS From existing literature about MDRE, we found some approaches aimed at generation of UML models from source artefacts
Summary
Legacy systems are used by many organizations because they execute critical operations and are non-negligible. Several research studies already exist such as tools like MoDisco [6] and transformation languages like Gra2MoL [7] are developed to carry out MDRE but the focus of these researches is only on getting the structure of legacy systems from available source code. Researchers aimed to cover the gap of extraction and assessment of behavioral aspects from the source artefact, yet there is no tool or technique available for MDRE to facilitate both structural and behavioral aspects of legacy system using UML models. The objective of this research work is to provide a full MDRE framework (Src2MoF) which overcome the abovementioned research gaps i.e. Capable of generating behavioral models along with structural models from Java source code. The major contributions of Src2MoF are: 1. Extraction of Structural aspects from source artefact: Exploration of subject system and pulling out the features related to static structure, elements and relationships between multiple elements of existing system’s design
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