Using Reengineering for Migration to or Evolution of Component Based Software Systems

Many reengineering techniques have been presented in the software engineering communities and some of them have been successful in the evolution and maintenance of complex legacy systems, but so far the target of these techniques has mostly been traditional software such as modular software. On the other hand Component Based Software engineering (CBSE) is growing in both academic research communities and industry, because the costs of the software development, maintenance, and evolution can be decreased by the benefits that CBSE offers, e.g. reusing components, better communication protocols, etc. As CBSE grows, the importance of using experiences of the reengineering community to migrate the traditional software to component based software and also to mature the component based development is revealed. This paper is an overview of using reengineering techniques in CBSE. We present a summary of component based technology in general, and in real-time context in particular. Then we review how CBSE can benefit from reengineering techniques. We also describe the extra considerations that should be taken into account when using the reengineering techniques for real-time components.