Section: Application Domains

Model-driven Reverse Engineering

One important and original domain that is being investigated by the AtlanMod team is the reverse engineering of legacy code. Here again this spans through a spectrum of application domains, the legacy being coded in such languages as ADA, Java, COBOL, C, C++ or even FORTRAN. We have shown how the reverse engineering practices may be advantageously revisited with the help of MDE and open-source tooling. The team has set up the MoDisco (see 5.5 ) project under Eclipse.org to investigate this and to federate the international research efforts in this domain. The main idea is that a metamodel may precisely express what we want to extract from a low-level legacy code. For example we can define a rational process to extract business rules from COBOL legacy programs. The rise in abstraction allowed by MDE may bring new hopes that reverse engineering can now move beyond ad-hoc practices. The MoDisco Eclipse project is being referenced by the OMG ADM (Architecture-Driven Modernization) normalization initative. The AtlanMod team has proposed to bridge the open-source MoDisco project and the ADM initiative at OMG [34] . In 2009, AtlanMod has notably worked on the coupling of static and dynamic models [24] , the measure of reverse-engineered models [25] , and model-based platform cartography [22] .