Application S/W re-engineering approach in the steel plant to improve productivity efficiently

POSCO, the largest steel manufacturing company in Korea, uses a three-layered software architecture for manufacturing process. Of those three layers, the second layer contains various applications to measure and control manufacturing processes, but about four to five applications are newly developed or upgraded yearly because of replacement of deteriorated manufacturing facilities, new functions, or new performance requirements. POSCO wants to find a way to increase development productivity to be more competitive in the global market and save the cost of development and maintenance which typically takes six months to a year depending on type of application. In order to find a way to increase productivity, we analyzed the existing legacy applications and identified common but repeatedly developed parts, and variants that implemented features that are unique to each application. Based on these analysis results, we applied various software engineering principles and could largely automate the process of developing process management components, and message and record handling modules. We carried on actual development using these modules and could achieve a substantial reduction in the development time.