Introductory Presentations

HTML-converted Microsoft Powerpoint presentations are available for viewing. These present
• A brief overview of the Renaissance Consortium, method, aims and reports.
• The technical achievements of the Renaissance project, including overviews of results, framework fundamentals, and the integration/evolutionary requirements that provide the motivation for consultancy reports.

Objectives

The principle business objective of the RENAISSANCE partners are to improve their capability to offer commercial services in the area of system evolution and to increase their return on investment in their software assets. To meet these objectives, the RENAISSANCE project has established the following technical objective:

• Support application evolution from centralised to distributed client-server architectures.
• Support the recovery of system family designs and subsequent evolution using existing CASE tools.
• Support evolution through the reuse of sub-systems recycled from existing systems.
• Provide a method for project managers to assess the costs, risks and benefits of evolution options.
• Integrate all of this support into a systematic method to support system evolution.

This research is driven by a number of problems with the current state of the industry, towards a set of relevant rationale issues, to address these goals.

Results

• A set of RENAISSANCE consultancy reports. These will cover architectural modelling, client-server evolution, evolution risks economics, the reverse engineering of system families and the recycling of reusable code components. The consultancy reports will provide detailed advice for consultants who are developing services and users who are applying the project results.
• An integrated RENAISSANCE evolution method to guide the process of system evolution. This will be distinguished from other re-engineering projects by its focus on architectural evolution and the recovery of designs of system families in C and 4GLs rather than the more common COBOL or Fortran.
• HoodNICE CASE toolkit extensions to reverse engineer the design of system families written in C.

Workplan

The technical work of the project will be driven by the needs of application partners. We have established a management structure to ensure that application requirements are central and workplan which allows adequate time for evaluation in a real commercial setting. The technical work of the project will be carried out in three closely related development streams with associated exploitation and management activities:

1. A baseline technology development stream. This will be concerned with solving some of the technological problems of evolution. The outputs will be the RENAISSANCE reports and HoodNICE toolset extensions.
2. A method integration stream. This will integrate the technological solutions and will provide process guidelines, notations, rules and recomendations for system evolution. Advice on the use of existing CASE and re-engineering tools will be included. The principle output will be the evolution method handbook.
3. An evaluation stream. The technical activities will be guided by a parallel evaluation activity. This will define, in detail, the evolution problems faced by the application partners and will evaluate the technical work of the project. The key outputs will be a definition of the specific problems faced by application partners, a framework for assessing the evolution method and reports on the evaluation itself.

Exploitation

The results of the RENAISSANCE project will be exploited in following ways:

1. Direct exploitation of the results by the application partners to improve their own applications management, evolution, re-engineering and reuse processes. Application requirements will drive the project, so that the method developed will be immediately applicable by the application partners.
2. Through consultancy on system evolution, re-engineering, reuse and client-server transition by partners. This consultancy will exploit the RENAISSANCE report. The method book will disseminate the method and will help market associated consultancy activities.

The project work is positioned in important and growing market areas (re-engineering, client-server migration, 4GLs) so has a firm market opportunity which will pull the project results through to exploitation.