Modernization of legacy systems is a new research area in the software industry that is intended to provide support for transforming an existing software system to a new one that satisfies new demands. Software modernization requires technical frameworks for information integration and tool interoperability that allow managing new platform technologies, design techniques, and processes. The new OMG (Object Management Group) initiative for modernization aligned with this requirement is Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM). Reverse engineering techniques play a crucial role in system modernization. In this chapter, the authors describe the state-of-the-art in the model-driven modernization area, reverse engineering in particular, and discuss about existing tools and future trends. In addition, they describe a framework to reverse engineering models from object-oriented code that distinguishes three different abstraction levels linked to models, metamodels, and formal specifications. As an example, this chapter shows how to reverse engineering use case diagrams from Java code in the ADM context focusing on transformations at metamodel level. The authors validate their approach by using Eclipse Modeling Framework.
