The Implications of Non-Functional Requirements for the Reengineering of Legacy Code

Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the IEEE. Abstract This paper describes the process whereby we investigate the implementation of non-functional requirements and their implications on the reengineering process. Our work has so far concentrated on the identification of reusable units from existing legacy systems. However, the results from our approaches so far have found that the functionality is difficult to separate into separate units. We have found that certain aspects of the code tend to hold the units together. In this paper, we propose that these aspects be the implementation of non-functional requirements, and, that if these aspects can be filtered out, larger and more reusable object would be obtained through the use of reuse reengineering approaches. This paper describes the process by which we identify the non-functional requirements and evaluates the usefulness of the process through a number of case studies.