Re-engineering legacy systems to meet quality requirements: an experience report

The paper is a summary of a third party re-engineering project aiming to adjust a legacy system to the new quality standard established by the customer. The quality standard is defined in the form of a set of metrics each associated with a range of acceptable values. A set of 100 programs has been restructured and modularised to meet the quality requirements. When possible, automated tools have been used in order to reduce the costs, standardise the results, and ease the transfer of techniques and methodologies to the customer. The re-engineered programs have replaced the original versions in the customer production environment. Their quality, and in particular their understandability and maintainability, is considerably increased as confirmed by the customer´s technical personnel. The work described is a preliminary step towards the definition of a larger re-engineering project to bring the customer´s software portfolio into line with the new quality standard