Strategic reengineering of software. Lifecycle approach

Abstract

Software systems must be constantly upgraded to be in tune with an evolving business environment. Due to inefficiency of current maintenance methods, many of the old programs do not meet company's strategic needs. Can we re-engineer those programs or must they be rewritten from scratch? Common goals for re-engineering software have been to improve maintainability of programs and to convert programs into a newer computer, database or language. In this paper, we describe a framework for strategic re-engineering in which target systems are substantially redesigned in order to meet company's strategic goals. Strategic re-engineering is much like redevelopment, accelerated by reuse of information that is extracted from existing, still viable from business point of view, programs. In the paper, we discuss the impact of company's strategic plans on software re-engineering and describe life cycle phases of strategic re-engineering with CASE.