Galileo: a tool built from mass-market applications
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
A key driver of software obsolescence is change in hardware and system software standards. In the area of software tools, there is now great pressure to host on Intel/Windows platforms tool functions that in the past were typically found in Unix or mainframe environments. In such cases, there can be value in reusing core parts of such legacy systems. Two standard methods for doing this are reengineering and wrapping. Reengineering, being unrestricted in the changes allowed, permits the removal of obsolete parts of a system but creates the risk that changes will break the complex and brittle reused code. Wrapping involves the reuse of existing code without change, but at the cost of including obsolete elements into the new environment. In this paper we propose unwrapping as a new synthesis of these two approaches. To unwrap is to remove unwanted design elements, but with a strong emphasis on leaving core code unchanged. We discuss our preliminary use of this approach to reuse core elements of two Unix-based reliability engineering tools in a modern tool based on package-oriented programming.