Service-oriented reverse reengineering: 5W1H model-driven re-documentation and candidate services identification

The purpose of this paper is to propose a service-oriented reverse reengineering that consists of re-documentation and design recovery. To understand the legacy system, we need to re-document the legacy system in a highlevel abstraction by using UML visual models through an initial reverse engineering. For this re-documentation, we propose a new re-documentation technique called 5W1H (Why, Who, When, Where, What, and How) model-driven re-documentation. Based upon the re-documented software visual model, we attempt to identify the scope of locating the candidate services from a legacy system. To show the feasibility of our approach, two applications using different design methods and architectures are re-documented into visual models. After recovering design methods and architectural patterns from the visual models, which have been injected into source code implicitly or explicitly to bring clear separation of concerns, we locate the scope of candidate services from the legacy system. We can reduce the effort of identifying candidate services by using the visualized model since we can discover highly possible locations for reusable business logic effectively. The service-oriented reverse engineering using 5W1H re-documentation technique will help a service producer to easily discover the candidate services from a legacy system through software re-documentation.