Maximizing reuse during reengineering

Many businesses face the challenge of reengineering their existing software to comply with new architectures and to implement streamlined business processes. The reengineering of a large software system is an expensive and complex engineering task. Given the investment already made in the system, organizations are understandably reluctant to throw that investment away. To retain some of the investment already made in the existing software, maximizing the amount of reuse is essential. Tools to assist the programmer in understanding the existing code, determine what is reusable and help in the adaptation of the components to fit new requirements are central to this undertaking. In this paper we describe an approach that supports the process of understanding and discovering reusable abstractions in systems that are to be reengineered