XIS-Reverse: A Model-driven Reverse Engineering Approach for Legacy Information Systems

Due to the development of new technologies companies face high costs managing and maintaining their legacy applications, thus upgrading those systems became a complex challenge. This paper describes a model-driven reverse engineering approach that aims to support the mentioned challenge. This approach takes as input the legacy relational database schema, but also user preferences to better guide the reverse engineering process. From these artefacts it is possible to extract models of the legacy application through model-to-model transformations based on a set of well defined rules and heuristics. The main contributions of this proposal (compared with the state of the art) are the semi-automatic identification of generalizations and aggregations and the possibility to automatically extract default values to enrich the produced models. The paper also includes an evaluation and a discussion of the proposal based on a simple case study and a real-world application.