Decomposing legacy systems into objects: an eclectic approach

The identification of objects in procedural programs has long been recognis ed as a key to renewing legacy systems. As a consequence, several authors h ave proposed methods and tools that achieve, in general, same level of succ ess, but do not always precisely identify a coherent set of objects. We sho w that using an eclectic approach, where a domain expert software engineer is encouraged to tailor and combine existing approaches, may overcome the l imitation of the single approaches and helps to better address the particul ar goals of the project at hand and the unique aspects of the subject syste m. The eclectic approach is illustrated by reporting experiences from a cas e study of identifying coarse-grained, persistent objects to be used in the migration of a COBOL system to a distributed component system. (C) 2001 El sevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.