A re-engineering evaluation of Software Refinery: architecture, process and technology

The quality of software re-engineering tools depends on that of the generic environments used in their construction. Because re-engineering is extremely challenging, too much so for full automation, generic re-engineering environment design criteria emphasise linguistic expressiveness and interaction with persistent repositories for program representations. Existing quality re-engineering environments, such as the Software Refinery tool, go a long way to satisfying these criteria, but fail to meet open systems criteria. One remedial approach is to recreate some of the functionality of these environments by modifying public domain technology, but which runs the risk of limited interoperability and over-investment in development