Extracting functionally equivalent object-oriented designs from legacy imperative code

This research defines a methodology for automatically extracting functionally equivalent object-oriented designs from legacy imperative programs. The Parameter-Based Object Identification (PBOI) methodology is based on fundamental ideas that relate programs written in imperative languages such as C or Cobol to objects and classes written in object-oriented languages such as Ada 95 or C++. Transformations have been developed that formalize the PBOI methodology and a formal proof is provided showing the extracted object-oriented design is functionally equivalent to the legacy imperative system. To focus the task of re-engineering, generic models of imperative programming languages and object-oriented programming languages have been developed. The formal transformations convert imperative subprograms represented in the Generic Imperative Model (GIM) into classes and objects represented in the Generic Object-Oriented Design Model (GOM). A taxonomy of imperative subprograms has also been developed which classifies all imperative subprograms into one of six categories. A proof of concept prototype has been developed and a 3000-line FORTRAN-77 system has been converted to an object-oriented design as a feasibility demonstration.