Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns

This book collects and distills successful techniques in planning a reengineering project, reverse-engineering, problem detection, migration strategies and software redesign.

This book is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. You can either download the PDF for free, or you can buy a softcover copy from lulu.com.

The documentation is missing or obsolete, and the original developers have departed. Your team has limited understanding of the system, and unit tests are missing for many, if not all, of the components. When you fix a bug in one place, another bug pops up somewhere else in the system. Long rebuild times make any change difficult. All of these are signs of software that is close to the breaking point.

Based on the authors' industrial experiences, this book is a guide on how to reverse engineer legacy systems to understand their problems, and then reengineer those systems to meet new demands.

Patterns are used to clarify and explain the process of understanding large code bases, hence transforming them to meet new requirements. The key insight is that the right design and organization of your system is not something that can be evident from the initial requirements alone, but rather as a consequence of understanding how these requirements evolve.

Features:

Describes how to reverse engineer a monolithic system to understand how it really works and how to identify potential problems.Includes reengineering patterns that tackle well-known reengineering techniques often encountered in object-oriented programming, such as introducing polymorphism, factoring out common behavior, detecting duplicated code, and understanding design.Shows how to build a culture of continuous reengineering for achieving flexible and maintainable object-oriented systems.