Recovering class diagrams from data-intensive legacy systems

Several reverse engineering methods for recovering objects from legacy systems have been proposed in the literature, but most of them neglect to identify the relationships among the objects, or recover only a part of them. The paper describes a method for recovering an OO (object oriented) model together with the objects and relationships among them. The proposed approach integrates the results of reverse engineering of both the procedural code and the persistent data stores of the system, and exploits a number of heuristic criteria to obtain a class diagram. A preliminary experiment carried out to validate the method on a COBOL medium-sized system yielded encouraging results.