Pattern-based software reengineering: a case study

Most legacy software systems were developed in imperative languages with traditional design approaches. Instead of continually maintaining these legacy systems in their original architecture and design at high cost, reengineering them to new systems with good design and architecture can significantly improve their understandability, reusability and maintainability. Design patterns (DPs) combine successful established design practices and experts' experiences into a set of inter-related components that exhibit known behaviours with better flexible structures. Software development with DPs provides easier understanding and standardization that make system evolution much more effective. In this paper, we use a parallel program generation environment (PPGE) as a case study to demonstrate the reengineering of a traditional software system into a pattern-based software system. An architecture using the dynamic-packing component library (ADPCL) composed of existing well-known design patterns, and a pattern-based reengineering approach for the transformation of systems are proposed.