A Tool to Reengineer Legacy Systems to Object-Oriented Systems

Software evolution is an inevitable process for software systems. Repeated changes alter the structure of a system, rapidly degrading it and making the system "legacy". Reengineering seems to be a promising approach to upgrade these systems according to the latest technologies. This paper describes a tool to reengineer procedural systems written in Cobol, Fortran, C or Pascal, into object-oriented ones written in Smalltalk. The prototype developed identifies potential classes automatically, but allows user intervention to work up conflicts.