Tutorial 6D

Comprehension and Evolution of Legacy Software

Vaclav Rajlich

Legacy systems have one or several of the following attributes: they were implemented many years ago, their technology became obsolete, their structure deteriorated, they represent a large investment, they contain business rules not recorded elsewhere, they cannot be easily replaced, or the original authors are not available. Software comprehension typically consumes more than a half of the difficult effort of maintaining legacy systems. The tutorial will give an overview of the available techniques and tools.

Vaclav Rajlich is a professor and former chair of the Department of Computer Science at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. Before that, he was an associate professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and software manager at the Research Institute for Mathematical Machines in Prague, Czech Republic.

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1997 International Conference on Software Engineering

Last modified: 10 May 1997