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Introduction
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These documents furnish the reader with an
overview of both the technical and managerial
aspects of software evolution and
reengineering.
The reports fall into two categories:
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RENAISSANCE
Consultancy Reports
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These documents deal with assessing how existing
technology may be deployed and adapted to solve
evolution problems. They provide specific and
detailed advice and guidance on migrating
applications written in 3GLs and 4GLs from a
centralised system to a distributed client server
system.
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Client
Server Migration Report
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The objective of this document is to provide
technical guidelines for the migration of legacy
systems to distributed, client/server,
architectures.
The recommendations given in this document
provide guidance to a system architect looking for
possible target architectures with a specific focus
on reuse, integration, encapsulation and migration
of existing system components or parts. Issues like
the extension of a legacy system architecture and
the integration of legacy system components are
specifically addressed.
In addition to these conceptual recommendations,
a list of techniques and tools to build such
evolutionary architectures is presented. This list
gives practical advice about the use of these
techniques to build such architectures and gives
guidelines to support their selection.
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Architectural
Modelling for Evolution
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Business needs often demand changes to an
established core system in an organisation. All too
often, however, the current system is lacking
documentation, expensive to maintain and makes use
of outdated technology. In order to make decisions
on the evolution of the system, knowledge about it
must be elicited and made explicit.
This document provides the system architect with
a range of techniques for modelling system aspects
that must be understood in order to make
evolutionary decisions.
The document focuses on context and technical
modelling. The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is
chosen as an integrative modelling technique for
the technical modelling. In addition, the report
contains an overview of UML.
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Evolution
Planning Report
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This report is aimed at consultants who are
assisting clients in the reengineering and
evolution of their commercial data processing
systems. It provides general advice on making a
business assessment of whether or not to reengineer
a system, which reengineering strategies should be
adopted, methods of risk management and estimation
techniques for evolution.
Appendix 1 contains questionnaires for risk
management, and appendix 2 provides a summary
template.
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(Postscript
format)
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RENAISSANCE
Technology Briefing Reports
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This collection of reports provides readers with
concise overviews of key technologies in
the field of software reengineering. All reports
follow a common layout and together furnish the
reader with an overview of all major technologies
in the field.
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System Modelling
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This report provides a good introduction to
System Modelling. It introduces key concepts such
as design methods, module interconnection
languages, software architectures and design
patterns and it discusses their respective
advantages and disadvantages. The relationship
between system modelling and the evolution process
is also discussed. The report is complemented by an
overview of available tool support and an
assessment of the disciplines maturity.
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Process Support
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This report centers around workflow
technology support for business processes.
Workflow technology, it argues can support both the
development process and the overall business
process. Some definitions are offered and related
technologies are discussed.
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MiddleWare
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This report provides a technical overview of
MiddleWare technology. A tentative categorisation
of those systems into data management,
communication, distribution, object management,
application co-operation, presentation and system
management services is presented. Each of these
catgories is then examined in turn and the report
is rounded of with an overview of current
trends.
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RAD/4GLs
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The use of Rapid Application
Development tools is presented as an
attractive strategy for migrating from centralised
systems to distributed client-server architectures.
The report provides short introductions to the
major rapid development tools such as visual
programming, componentware, 4GLs, frameworks and
application generators. Again tool support and its
maturity are examined.
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Internet Technology
Briefing Report
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This report gives a brief overview of internet
and web technologies and discusses their impact on
the evolution of legacy systems. In this report the
web is seen as a front-end technology for
both existing and new systems. The report also
contains a comparison between web-based and
client/server-based rapid application
development.
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Database Technology
Briefing Report
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A quick overview of all major database
technologies is given. Legacy systems, state of the
art, as well as emerging and specialised database
systems are discussed. Those technologies are then
contrasted. This is followed by a discussion of
their relationship to software evolution.
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Reverse Engineering
Briefing Report
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This report introduces the traditional view of
reverse engineering as a two-step process of
information extraction and information abstraction,
as well as a more recent one which considers it as
a three stage process of modelling, extraction and
abstraction. Three important types of reverse
engineering, namely redocumentation, structural
redocumentation and design recovery are then
shortly presented.
The report advocates the use of reverse
engineering as a tool for gaining
understanding of both the current and the
desired system and the use of this information for
guiding the choice of reengineering strategy.
The concept of legacy leverage is
introduced and the three classic migration
strategies from old to new systems, namely: all
new, incremental and evolutionary are considered.
Once again tool support for this activity is
discussed and pointers to future developments are
provided.
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Evolution Management
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This briefing report discusses the management
aspects of the software evolution process. It
starts out by providing definitions for software
evolution, reengineering and redevelopment. It then
elaborates on evolution planning activities, such
as risk management, scheduling, monitoring,
business process reengineering and application
understanding. Special attention is then given to
the decision on whether to do nothing, reengineer
or redevelop. The report concludes with an overview
and maturity assessment of the available tool
support.
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Distributed Object
Technology
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A short introduction to distributed object
technology and its advantages over non-distributed
technology is given. The report then elaborates on
the two major technologies in this field: the
Object Management Group's CORBA
architecture and Microsoft's OLE. Short
descriptions of the major components of these
technologies are given. The report then briefly
turns its attention to other technologies such as
Visual Basic Extensions (VBX) and ActiveX, before
concluding with an overview of the available tool
support.
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