Migration to object oriented platforms: a state transformation approach

It has become evident that the benefits of object orientation warrant the design and development of reengineering methods that aim to migrate legacy procedural systems to modern object oriented platforms. However, most research efforts in this direction focus mostly on the extraction of an object model from the legacy procedural code without taking into account quality requirements for the target migrant system. This paper presents a reengineering workbench that allows for quality requirements of the target system to be modeled as soft-goals and software transformations to be applied selectively towards achieving specific quality requirements for the target system. In this context, the migration process is denoted by a sequence of transformations that alter the state of the system being reengineered. A Markov model approach and the Viterbi algorithm are used to identify the optimal sequence of transformations that can be applied at any given state of the migration process. For the evaluation of the proposed workbench, a migration experiment of gnu AVL tree libraries is presented.