Agile model-driven re-engineering

Kevin Lano; Howard Haughton; Ziwen Yuan; Hessa Alfraihi

doi:10.1007/s11334-024-00568-z

Agile model-driven re-engineering

Kevin Lano^*, Howard Haughton, Ziwen Yuan, Hessa Alfraihi

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

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Abstract

In this paper we describe an Agile model-driven engineering (MDE) approach, AMDRE, for the re-engineering of legacy systems. The objective is to support the reuse of business-critical functionality from such systems and the porting of legacy code to modernised platforms, together with technical debt reduction to improve the system maintainability and extend its useful life. AMDRE uses a lightweight MDE process which involves the automated abstraction of software systems to UML specifications and the interactive application of refactoring and rearchitecting transformations to remove quality flaws and architectural flaws. We demonstrate the approach on Visual Basic, COBOL and Python legacy codes, including a finance industry case. Significant quality improvements are achieved, and translation accuracy over 80% is demonstrated. In comparison to other MDE re-engineering approaches, AMDRE does not require high MDE skills and should be usable by mainstream software practitioners.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	559-584
Number of pages	26
Journal	Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering
Volume	20
Issue number	4
Early online date	18 Jun 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-024-00568-z
Publication status	Published - Dec 2024

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Agile model-driven re-engineering_LANO_2024_GREEN AAMAccepted author manuscript, 523 KBLicence: CC BY-ND

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Agile model-driven re-engineering

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