Object-oriented reengineering: patterns and techniques

Surprising as it may seem, many of the early adopters of the object-oriented paradigm already face a number of problems typically encountered in large-scale legacy systems. Software engineers are now confronted with millions of lines of industrial source code, developed using object-oriented design methods and languages of the late 80s and early 90s. These systems exhibit a range of problems, effectively preventing them from satisfying the evolving requirements imposed by their customers. This paper shares our knowledge concerning the reengineering of object-oriented legacy systems. We draw upon our experiences, to show you techniques and tools we have applied on real industrial OO systems to detect and repair problems. In particular, we discuss issues like reverse engineering, design extraction, metrics, refactoring and program visualisation.