Software Stability in Software Reengineering

Abstract

Legacy systems won't evolve well in today's modern computing environments without reengineering. Unfortunately, most reengineering projects are only concerned about whether the systems can be seamlessly integrated into the environments and usually ignore the quality in the improvement of the legacy systems. We all agree that it would be better to observe both integration and quality improvement implemented in the reengineering process. Software stability makes this possible in the reengineering process so that the new systems can run in a heterogeneous computing environment but also be stable enough to reduce the maintenance costs and efforts. In this paper, a connection between the stability modeling and reengineering process for legacy system is described. A preliminary study on techniques for building a better stable system will be presented although the techniques are still not very promising yet. We will also discuss the issues and challenges of applying software stability into the legacy reengineering process.