Software Engineering Institute

Many DoD organizations are considering product line initiatives as a means of overcoming the issues of quality, cost, and schedule inherent in a "one-at-a-time" system development or acquisition paradigm. Because a product line approach revolves around the creation of a comprehensive set of core assets, mining and adapting (i.e., reengineering) existing legacy system assets can offer significant leverage. By mining and adapting these assets, an organization can exploit the proven capabilities of existing systems, reduce the funding required, and develop/acquire new systems of higher quality within a shorter time frame.  

This technical note focuses on providing guidance for DoD organizations for mining legacy systems to obtain core assets that will fit into a previously defined software architecture for a product line. We explain how insights from a conceptual model, Options Analysis for Reengineering (OAR), can be used in an acquisition context to provide the government with an approach for obtaining greater insight and understanding into a contractor's proposed technical reengineering approach.