A Form Driven Object-Oriented Reverse Engineering Methodology

This thesis presents an object-oriented reverse engineering methodology using forms in order to recover semantics of legacy application, which has many problems such as increasing maintenance cost, and some difficulties in migration to new systems environment. But, most of legacy systems are important assets in organization. Therefore, it is very advantageous to use them continuously and they are strategic input sources to get a high level conceptual model. Our form driven object-oriented reverse engineering methodology consists of five phases such as form and usage analysis, form object slicing, object structure modeling, scenario design, and model integration. User forms become input sources for reverse engineering. Also, knowledge about user interaction with legacy application is captured and its knowledge is used to extract the design semantics of existing application through later phases. A prototype system for capturing form knowledge and supporting reverse engineering phases in this FORE methodology will be developed to aid reverse engineers.