Reengineering and refactoring

Do you have such problems as:

• software isn’t stable, or it runs slow;
• it’s impossible to extend it any further,
• software has been developed using old technologies and languages and now needs to be migrated to new platforms using up-to-date technologies.

Sometimes there may not be any other choice but to  reengineer or refactor a software application or system. Both processes are difficult, time consuming, and costly, but at the same time these investments  can reduce support costs, increase sales and productivity of  employees, as well as attract new clients.

Software reengineering and refactoring are related but distinct activities. Reengineering a software system typically involves first reverse engineering it in order to extract a high-level design, and then forward engineering it to improve its design, add new functionality or correct errors. Refactoring differs from this in two ways. Firstly, refactoring is usually a code-to-code transformation and secondly, its goal is to improve design, not to change functionality. Reengineering has been a standard physical engineering process for a long time, coming into use as a software process in the early 1990s. The advent of refactoring is more recent, aided by the burgeoning popularity of Agile Processes that emphasize code quality and regard refactoring as a central part of the development process. Unlike software reengineering, refactoring has no equivalent in physical engineering.