Using Formal Concept Analysis for Scheduling Legacy System Iterative Reengineering Process

Iterative reengineering process is considered as an effective methodology to organize reengineering projects on degenerated but in-use legacy systems. By replacing legacy components gradually, the functionalities and requirements of legacy system can be satisfied. In practice, scheduling legacy components and data in every iterative cycle correctly is a great challenge to project managers, because of the complexities of dependency relations between legacy components and data. Formal concept analysis (FCA), which has strong mathematical capability of processing a group of elements with properties, is introduced to solve this issue. The major contribution of this paper is proposing an original top-down schedule algorithm (TDSA) based on FCA to compute an iterative cycle reference table (ICRT), which lists all potential cycles for an iterative reengineering project. The computed iterative cycles can be performed in any order without stopping legacy system