Life-cycle approach to strategic re-engineering of software

Software systems must be constantly upgraded to be in tune with an evolving business environment. Owing to the inefficiency of current maintenance methods, many of the old programs do not meet companies' strategic needs. Can we re-engineer those programs or must they be rewritten from scratch? Common goals for re-engineering software have been to improve maintainability of programs and to convert programs into a newer computer, database or language. In this paper, we describe a framework for strategic re-engineering in which programs are substantially redesigned in order to meet companies' strategic goals. Strategic re-engineering is much Like redevelopment, accelerated by reuse of information that is extracted from existing, still viable from the business point of view, programs. We discuss the impact of companies' strategic plans on software re-engineering and describe life-cycle phases of strategic re-engineering with CASE.