Using reengineering and aspect-based techniques to retrieve knowledge embedded in object-oriented legacy system

This paper presents an approach to retrieve the knowledge embedded in object-oriented legacy system. This approach aids in the migration from object-oriented code, written in Java, to a combination of objects and aspects, using AspectJ. The approach uses aspect mining in order to identify possible crosscutting concerns from the object-oriented source code and extracts them through refactorings into new aspect-oriented code. Next, the aspect-oriented design is retrieved through software transformations and may be imported in a CASE tool, becoming available in higher abstraction levels. The retrieved information constitutes important knowledge that may be reused in future projects or in reengineering.