Legacy applications are valuable assets that should be integrated into busi
ness systems in succeeding generations. In order to take advantage of these
applications, progressive companies seek to improve current operations by
reverse engineering. This paper proposes the form driven object-oriented re
verse engineering (FORE) methodology by using forms to recover semantics of
legacy applications. Forms are exceptionally easy to understand because of
the user-oriented nature of the contents of business. This form driven obj
ect-oriented reverse engineering methodology consists of five different pha
ses: form usage analysis, form object slicing, object structure modeling, s
cenario design, and model integration. Knowledge of the form structure and
the user's interaction between legacy application is compiled to extract th
e design semantics. This application demonstrates the practical usability o
f the FORE methodology by transforming the resulting object models into wel
l-known UML-based models. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All r
ights reserved.