Many organizations face a serious challenge introducing new technologies into existing systems. Effective modernization requires knowing and articulating specific goals for the reengineering effort, conscious selection of technologies and technical approaches that can achieve those goals in the context of the class of system being upgraded, a staged migration plan, and an integration strategy to make in-hand components work under the newly adopted architecture. Although the study of reengineering is moving towards an engineering discipline, there are as yet no proven decision frameworks that allow an organization to rationally choose a modernization strategy. This paper provides an in-depth look at the engineering trade-offs made in modernizing a manufacturing engineering design system to use distributed object technology. From this case study, the outlines of a more general reengineering decision framework can be seen, and these are discussed.

It has been difficult to objectively assess the real value or maturity of the Object Management Group's Object Management Architecture (OMA). While experience reports have appeared in the literature, these have focused more on the functionality of the end-system than on systematically exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the OMA, and providing practical guidelines on the effective use of the OMA for specific software-engineering problems. In this paper we describe a case study in the use of the OMA to integrate legacy software components into a distributed object system. We assess the OMA in this problem context, and indicate strengths and weaknesses of the specification and current implementations. We extrapolate our experience to a broader class of component-based software systems, and recommend an architectural strategy for the effective use of the OMA to this class of systems.