Software Re-Engineering

Sequence [Todays Agenda]

Content of Lecture
•Software Evolution Process
•Software Maintenance Process
General Terminologies

 Evolution processes
 Change processes for software systems
 Software maintenance
 Making changes to operational software systems

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Software change

 Software change is inevitable:

 New requirements emerge when the software is used
 The business environment changes
 Errors must be repaired
 New computers and equipment are added to the system
 The performance or reliability of the system may have to be
improved
 A key problem for all organizations is implementing and
managing change to their existing software systems

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Software maintenance and evolution

 Software maintenance and evolution are essential

aspects of computer software training, as they ensure
the quality, reliability, and usability of software products
and systems. However, maintaining and evolving
software is not a straightforward task, as it involves
various challenges, trade-offs, and decisions that affect
the business and customer satisfaction. In this article, we
will explore some case studies of software maintenance
and evolution in different domains and contexts, and
discuss how they aligned their goals and strategies with
the needs and expectations of their stakeholders.

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Case Study 1: NASA's Space Shuttle Software

 NASA's Space Shuttle Software (SSS) was one of the

most complex and critical software systems ever
developed, as it controlled the launch, orbit, landing, and
emergency abort of the shuttle. The SSS evolved over
three decades, from 1977 to 2011, through 27 releases
and 2.5 million lines of code. The SSS maintenance and
evolution process was driven by four main goals: safety,
reliability, performance, and adaptability.

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Case Study 2: Google's Search Engine

 Google's Search Engine (GSE) is one of the most

popular and influential software products in the world, as
it handles billions of queries per day and provides
relevant and personalized results to users. The GSE
evolved from a simple prototype in 1996 to a
sophisticated and scalable system in 2021, through
hundreds of updates and experiments. The GSE
maintenance and evolution process was driven by two
main goals: relevance and innovation. To achieve these
goals, Google adopted a data-driven and user-centric
approach, based on machine learning, experimentation,
feedback, and iteration.

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Case Study 2: Google's Search Engine

 The GSE also had to deal with diverse and dynamic data
sources, user preferences, market trends, and
competitors. Google's GSE is an example of how
software maintenance and evolution can deliver value
and differentiation to a software product in a competitive
and evolving market.

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Importance of evolution

 Organizations have huge investments in their software

systems - they are critical business assets
 To maintain the value of these assets to the business,
they must be changed and updated
 The majority of the software budget in large companies
is devoted to changing and evolving existing software
rather than developing new software

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A spiral model of development and evolution

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Evolution and servicing

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Evolution and servicing

 Evolution
 The stage in a software system’s life cycle where it is in
operational use and is evolving as new requirements are
proposed and implemented in the system
 Servicing
 At this stage, the software remains useful but the only changes
made are those required to keep it operational, i.e. bug fixes and
changes to reflect changes in the software’s environment. No
new functionality is added
 Phase-out
 The software may still be used but no further changes are made
to it

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Evolution processes

 Software evolution processes depend on

 The type of software being maintained
 The development processes used
 The skills and experience of the people involved
 Proposals for change are the driver for system evolution
 Should be linked with components that are affected by the
change, thus allowing the cost and impact of the change to be
estimated
 Change identification and evolution continues throughout
the system lifetime

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Change identification and evolution processes

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The software evolution process

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Change implementation

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Change implementation

 Iteration of the development process where the revisions

to the system are designed, implemented and tested
 A critical difference is that the first stage of change
implementation may involve program understanding,
especially if the original system developers are not
responsible for the change implementation
 During the program understanding phase, you have to
understand how the program is structured, how it
delivers functionality and how the proposed change
might affect the program

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Exploratory Refactoring

 The best way to understand the unknown is simply to

dive into the code.
 Open up the Core project in your IDE and try renaming
methods, moving methods between classes, introducing
new interfaces, adding comments—basically anything
you can think of that makes the code cleaner and more
readable.
 This process is known as exploratory refactoring. It has a
couple of benefits.
 (Read section 2.1.1 from text book)

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System re-engineering

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Urgent change requests

 Urgent changes may have to be implemented without

going through all stages of the software engineering
process
 If a serious system fault has to be repaired to allow normal
operation to continue
 If changes to the system’s environment (e.g., an OS upgrade)
have unexpected effects
 If there are business changes that require a very rapid response
(e.g. the release of a competing product)

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The emergency repair process

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Software maintenance

 Modifying a program after it has been put into use

 The term is mostly used for changing custom software.
Generic software products are said to evolve to create
new versions.
 Maintenance does not normally involve major changes to
the system’s architecture
 Changes are implemented by modifying existing
components and adding new components to the system

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System re-engineering

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Types of maintenance

 Maintenance to repair software faults

 Changing a system to correct deficiencies in the way meets its
requirements
 Maintenance to adapt software to a different operating
environment
 Changing a system so that it operates in a different environment
(computer, OS, etc.) from its initial implementation
 Maintenance to add to or modify the system’s
functionality
 Modifying the system to satisfy new requirements

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Figure 9.8 Maintenance effort distribution

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Maintenance costs

 Usually greater than development costs (2* to

100* depending on the application)
 Affected by both technical and non-technical factors
 Increases as software is maintained. Maintenance
corrupts the software structure so makes further
maintenance more difficult.
 Ageing software can have high support costs (e.g., old
languages, compilers etc.).

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Figure 9.9 Development and maintenance costs

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Maintenance cost factors

 Team stability
 Maintenance costs are reduced if the same staff are involved with
them for some time
 Contractual responsibility
 The developers of a system may have no contractual
responsibility for maintenance so there is no incentive to design
for future change
 Staff skills
 Maintenance staff are often inexperienced and have limited
domain knowledge
 Program age and structure
 As programs age, their structure is degraded and they become
harder to understand and change

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Maintenance prediction

 Maintenance prediction is concerned with assessing

which parts of the system may cause problems and have
high maintenance costs
 Change acceptance depends on the maintainability of the
components affected by the change
 Implementing changes degrades the system and reduces its
maintainability
 Maintenance costs depend on the number of changes and costs
of change depend on maintainability

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Maintenance prediction

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System re-engineering

 Re-structuring or re-writing part or all of a legacy system

without changing its functionality
 Applicable where some but not all sub-systems of a
larger system require frequent maintenance
 Re-engineering involves adding effort to make them
easier to maintain. The system may be re-structured and
re-documented.

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Advantages of reengineering

 Reduced risk
 There is a high risk in new software development. There may be
development problems, staffing problems and specification
problems.
 Reduced cost
 The cost of re-engineering is often significantly less than the
costs of developing new software.

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The reengineering process

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Reengineering process activities

 Source code translation

 Convert code to a new language
 Reverse engineering
 Analyze the program to understand it
 Program structure improvement
 Restructure automatically for understandability
 Program modularization
 Reorganize the program structure
 Data reengineering
 Clean-up and restructure system data

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Reengineering cost factors

 The quality of the software to be reengineered

 The tool support available for reengineering
 The extent of the data conversion which is required
 The availability of expert staff for reengineering
 This can be a problem with old systems based on technology
that is no longer widely used

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Preventive maintenance by refactoring

 Refactoring is the process of making improvements to a

program to slow down degradation through change
 You can think of refactoring as ‘preventive maintenance’
that reduces the problems of future change
 Refactoring involves modifying a program to improve its
structure, reduce its complexity or make it easier to
understand
 When you refactor a program, you should not add
functionality but rather concentrate on program
improvement

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Refactoring and reengineering

 Re-engineering takes place after a system has been

maintained for some time and maintenance costs are
increasing. You use automated tools to process and re-
engineer a legacy system to create a new system that is
more maintainable.
 Refactoring is a continuous process of improvement
throughout the development and evolution process. It is
intended to avoid the structure and code degradation
that increases the costs and difficulties of maintaining a
system.

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“Bad smells” in program code

 Duplicate code
 The same or very similar code may be included at different
places in a program. This can be removed and implemented as
a single method or function that is called as required.
 Long methods
 If a method is too long, it should be redesigned as a number of
shorter methods
 Switch (case) statements
 These often involve duplication, where the switch depends on
the type of a value. The switch statements may be scattered
around a program. In object-oriented languages, you can often
use polymorphism to achieve the same thing.

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Key points

 Software development and evolution can be thought of

as an integrated, iterative process that can be
represented using a spiral model
 For custom systems, the costs of software maintenance
usually exceed the software development costs
 The process of software evolution is driven by requests
for changes and includes change impact analysis,
release planning and change implementation

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Key points

 Software re-engineering is concerned with re-structuring

and re-documenting software to make it easier to
understand and change
 Refactoring, making program changes that preserve
functionality, is a form of preventative maintenance.
 The business value of a legacy system and the quality of
the application should be assessed to help decide if a
system should be replaced, transformed or maintained

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