Transforming an imperative design into an object-oriented design

Abstract

Most of the traditional and legacy systems were designed using traditional methodologies such as Structured Analysis/Structured Design (SA/SO) methodology. Design of such a system is called an imperative design. After the introduction of the object-oriented technology, there are compelling reasons to redevelop those systems using this new technology to benefit from its merits. To redevelop them, there are two possible choices: either develop them from scratch using some object-oriented methodology, or use the available design documents (i.e., imperative design) of those systems and transform their designs into object-oriented designs. The second choice clearly results in saving both the development cost and time. This paper reports on an effort to build support for the second choice mentioned above. We started our effort in 1992 and proposed a framework of a redesign methodology. Our proposed redesign methodology, i.e., imperative design to object-oriented design (10-000), transforms a given imperative design of an already implemented system into an object-oriented design using the design documents of the system. The methodology works in four phases and they are presented formally. We also illustrate the methodology with a case study.