Agile model-driven re-engineering

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.