Getting Objects Methods and Interactions by Extracting Business Rules from Legacy Systems

The maintenance of legacy systems becomes over the years extremely complex and highly expensive due to the incessant changes of company activities and policies. In this case, a new or an improved system must replace the previous one. However, replacing those systems completely from scratch is also very expensive and it represents a huge risk. The optimal scenario is evolving those systems by profiting from the valuable knowledge embedded in them. This paper aims to present an approach for knowledge acquisition from existing legacy systems by extracting business rules from source code. In fact, the business rules are extracted and assigned next to the domain entities in order to generate objects methods and interactions in an object-oriented platform. Furthermore, a rules translation in natural language is given. The aim is advancing a solution for re-engineering legacy systems, minimize the cost of their modernization and keep very small the gap between the company business and the renovated systems.