Reverse engineering procedural code for object recovery

Software systems can deteriorate as a result of long-term maintenance. Original design documents are often not available or do not contain current information. This paper presents an object-oriented methodology for the reverse engineering of legacy systems which produces object-oriented abstractions from procedural code. These abstractions are then useful for the reengineering of systems to new computing environments. The objective is to produce abstract design descriptions from the source code by applying methods to extract objects from the source code and then aggregating the objects to form class representations. The methodological approach is to incrementally abstract the features and functionality of the existing system and to perform translations to object-oriented representations. The method is based on recognizing object abstractions in code using an approach that binds data elements based on their cohesive strength. It also utilizes a fuzzy reasoning approach to enhance the object extraction process. The methodology is supported by an environment that facilitates the application of the methodology.