A comparison of computer-assisted software reengineering approaches

Recent interest in software reengineering has resulted from the desire to take advantage of the huge investment in legacy software, both for upgrades of existing systems and for reuse in new systems. Because of this interest, a new type of CASE tool is emerging, specifically designed to support software understanding and to facilitate restructuring of software to make it easier to maintain and upgrade. This paper reports on our experience using two reengineering tools that support significantly different approaches to the reengineering task: a university research prototype that supports user-directed restructuring of C; and a commercially tool that supports automated restructuring for Ada. The application software used in the study includes part of a mission-critical software system originally developed in Jovial 573 and translated into Ada 83 and a radar analysis application originally developed in FORTRAN and hand translated to C