1994 Reports

Incremental Process Support for Code Reengineering

Heineman, George T.; Kaiser, Gail E.

Reengineering a large code base can be a monumental task, and the situation becomes even worse if the code is concomitantly being modified. For the past two years, we have been using the Marvel process centered environment (PCE) for all of our software development and are currently using it to develop the Oz PCE (Marvel's successor). Towards this effort, we are reengineering Oz's code base to isolate the process engine, transaction manager, and object management system as separate components that can be mixed and matched in arbitrary systems. In this paper, we show how a PCE can guide and assist teams of users in carrying out code reengineering while allowing them to continue their normal code development. The key features to this approach are its incremental nature and the ability of the PCE to automate most of the tasks necessary to maintain the consistency of the code base.