Reengineering is the systematic transformation of an existing system into a new form to realize quality improvements in operation, system capability, functionality, performance, or evolvability at a lower cost, schedule, or risk to the customer. Metrics measure certain properties of a software project by mapping them to numbers (or other symbols) according to well-defined, objective measurement rules. The measurement results are then used to describe, judge or predict the characteristics of the software project with respect to the property that has been measured. Usually, measurements are made to provide a foundation of information upon which decisions about software engineering tasks can be both planned and performed better. In this paper, a metrics framework, which can be used to calculate Reengineering Requirement Cost (RRC), has been proposed. On the basis of the results obtained by this metric, a decision can be made regarding maintenance/reengineering/retirement need of the software.
There is often a need to maintain old systems in organizations. But with the passage of time, this maintenance becomes costly. Hence, organizations may need to reengineer the system, i.e., redesign the system or some parts of the system by changing the design and implementation techniques. There are presently a lot of tools that help in this process. In this paper an effort has been made to purpose a metric `Reengineering Requirement' that helps in finding whether there is a requirement to reengineer a system or a part of system or one can continue with the maintenance of the system. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the first section gives an introduction to software maintenance, reengineering and retirement. The second section explains why eengineering is required in place of maintenance. The third section gives how metrics are used in the reengineering process. The fourth section deals with the study of five different software systems and the proposed metric to find whether there is a requirement to maintain, reengineer or retire the software. The final section concludes the work with future directions.
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