As soon as the architecture of a legacy system has been recovered and the overall understanding of the system has been increased using the techniques described in the previous sections, we are in a position to determine what should be done with it. Should it be abandoned or renovated? In reality, there is a close interplay between analysis and renovation since the analysis of well-structured code will yield more precise analysis results than the analysis of badly structured code. It is not uncommon that analysis/renovation is an iterative process. For simplicity we treat them in this section as sequential steps and concentrate on a factory-like approach to renovation (Section 3.1). Next, we discuss two examples (Section 3.2).
Unlike system understanding, which is inherently interactive, here the ultimate goal is a completely automated renovation factory, which can process millions of lines of code without human interaction.