Comparison of modernization approaches: with and without the knowledge based software reuse process

The ever increasing demand for improvements in software maintainability and modernization cannot be met through traditional techniques of software development and modernization. Most approaches to software development and modernization do not explicitly address software reuse however new approaches that address issues and concerns of software reuse must be developed. The benefits of software reuse are widely accepted by software engineers and developers. However based on our previous work in software reuse for the modernization of legacy systems, we have identified the need to build a knowledge based software reuse process and a reuse repository that manages reusable artefacts to enable software reuse to become an integral phase in the legacy system modernization process. Our latest legacy system modernization approach incorporates a reuse process and repository, which we have called the Knowledge Base Software Reuse (KBSR) Process and the KBSR Repository. The KBSR Process and Repository aim to give software engineers easy access to reusable software artefacts and reusable components within a defined process. We have applied two modernization approaches: one which the KBSR Process and one without the KBSR Process to modernize the same legacy system. In this paper we compare the two modernization approaches on different attributes which have been identified from our previous work as major issues in software reuse. We argue that knowledge based software reuse should become an integral part of the software development and modernization life cycle.