Proprietary vs. “open systems” options in the construction of knowledge-based software reengineering environments

The quality of software reengineering tools depends on that of the generic environments used in their construction. Some existing quality reengineering environments, such as the Software Refinery, go a long way to satisfying their particular design criteria, but fail to meet general 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. Our preferred approach however is to develop interfaces to general persistent object bases, to which bindings from existing languages, tools and proprietary environments can be made