Towards formalised guidelines for migrating structured designs to UML: a case study.

The paradigm shift from Structured Methods to Object-Oriented Methods has left industry with an enormous legacy of systems modeled with structured methods. It is necessary to migrate or re-engineer these legacy systems. Re-engineering of code has been practiced for many years but this work addresses a gap in design re-engineering. This paper develops semi-formal guidelines for migrating a documented Structured Design (DFD) to UML. Work is continuing to produce extensions to existing CASE and MeatCASE tools for the automatic conversion of the designs. The major benefit is the increased confidence in the preservation of functionality (completeness, consistency and correctness).