Cost-effective industrial software rejuvenation using domain-specific models

Software maintenance consumes a significant and increasing proportion of industrial software engineering budgets, only to maintain the existing product functionality. This hinders the development of new innovative features with added value to customers. To make software development efforts more effective, legacy software needs to be rejuvenated into a substantial redesign. We show that partially-automated software rejuvenation is becoming feasible and cost-effective in industrial practice. We use domain-specific models that abstract from implementation details, and apply a pragmatic combination of manual and automated techniques. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by the rejuvenation of legacy software of the Interventional X-ray machines developed by Philips Healthcare. cop. Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.