Many methods and tools for the reengineering of software systems have been developed so far However, the domain-specific requirements of telecommunication Systems have not been addressed sufficiently. These systems are designed in a process- rather than in a data-centered way. Furthermore, analyzing and visualizing dynamic behavior is a key to system understanding. In this paper, we report on tools for the reengineering of telecommunication systems which we have developed in close cooperation with an industrial partner These tools are based on a variety of techniques for understanding behavior such as visualization of link chains, recovery of state diagrams from the source code, and visualization of traces by different kinds of diagrams. Tool support has been developed step by step in response to the requirements and questions stated by telecommunication experts at Ericsson Eurolab Germany.

Abstract Maintenance of legacy systems is a challenging task. Often, only the source code is still available, while design or requirements documents have been lost or have not been kept up‐to‐date with the actual implementation. In particular, this applies to many business applications which are run on a mainframe computer and are written in COBOL. Many companies are confronted with the difficult task of migrating these systems to a client/server architecture with clients running on PCs and servers running on the mainframe. REforDI (REengineering for DIstribution) is a graph‐based environment supporting this task. REforDI provides integrated code analysis, re‐design, and code transformation for COBOL applications. To prepare the application for distribution, REforDI assists in the transition to an object‐based architecture, according to which the source code is subsequently transformed into Object COBOL. Internally, REforDI makes heavy use of generators to reduce the implementation effort and thus to enhance adaptability. In particular, graph‐based tools for re‐engineering are generated from a formal specification which is based on programmed graph transformations. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Do we have the right set of concepts for modeling and describing distributed real-time systems in software engineering? Languages like ROOM (Real-time Object-Oriented Modeling) and UML-RT (Unified Modeling Language for Real-Time) offer some basic concepts; however, system engineers of the application domain (e.g. in telecommunications) work with a variety of concepts which do not have a corresponding counterpart in software engineering. There seems to be some potential for transfer. This report explores the power of a well-known concept in telecommunications, the service access point (SAP). SAPs not only prove to be more powerful than layering is, but they even subsume the concept of planes, which are almost unknown in software engineering. SAPs turn out to be a basic modeling construct, which allows us to describe in a precise manner any communication architecture that is structured in layers and planes. In this paper, it is shown that a few improvements to ROOM/UML-RT can make the full power of SAPs available to the object-oriented design of distributed real-time systems.