System and method for deriving an object oriented design from the business rules of a legacy application

摘要

A method and system serves to derive class definitions from the program code of a legacy system. The objects of the legacy application are identified, and separately all the business rules of the application are identified. Each object has a data structure which describes its properties. The fields in this data structure are used to derive the candidate data attributes of the object. All the business rules which use some of the data attributes of the object either as input or output are grouped together as candidate methods of the object. The user selects some of the candidate data attributes and some of the candidate methods and uses them to designate a new class. The user may also decide if the data elements used in the methods are method parameters or global data attributes of the class.