Tutorials -- Monday All Day

Surprising as it may seem, many of the early adopters of the object-oriented paradigm already face a number of problems typically encountered in large-scale legacy systems. Software engineers are now confronted with millions of lines of industrial source code, developed using object-oriented design methods and languages of the late 80s. These systems exhibit a range of problems, effectively preventing them from satisfying the evolving requirements imposed by their customers. This tutorial will share our knowledge concerning the reengineering of object-oriented legacy systems. We will draw upon our experiences with the FAMOOS project to demonstrate techniques and tools we have applied on real industrial OO systems to detect and repair problems. In particular, we will discuss issues like metrics, design recovery, refactoring, tool integration.

The tutorial is targeted at programmers involved in maintenance and reengineering of large OO systems. Researchers interested in topics like metrics, design recovery, refactoring are welcome as well. Participants will learn how metrics, UML, and refactoring can help in reengineering OO systems and see tools that may support them in this task.

Attendee Background: Participants should have practical programming experience in at least one OO language (Smalltalk, C++, Java, Eiffel, etc.). Familiarity with UML is useful, though not required.

Serge Demeyer and Stephane Ducasse are post doctoral researchers in the Software Composition Group in Berne, serving as technical leaders of the FAMOOS esprit project; a project whose goal it is to come up with a set of reengineering techniques and tools to support the development of object-oriented frameworks.

Oscar Nierstrasz is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Berne, where he leads the Software Composition Group. He has been active in the object-oriented research community for many years, serving on program committees of among others, ECOOP, OOPSLA and ESEC. He has given several tutorials and invited talks on object-oriented technology at various international conferences and workshops.