User-Centred reverse engineering: Genesis-D project

In the last years, the requirements of the end-users are notably evolved. A good software must not have only a good functionality cover but it also must have good usability features. From this point of view, the most recent design methodologies focus on the interaction between the end-user and its user experience; in this way, the design focus there is not on the data element (represented as objects or relational entity) but on the end-user and its perception of the information anymore. According to growing needs, it is more and more frequent the requests of reengineering of existing products that, developed in many years, have a good coverage of the application domain; these existing products result completely unsuitable to the modern paradigms of interaction. In this paper, we introduce an experience of reengineering (in web perspective) of a legacy application on the environment monitoring. This experience has been performed into the industrial research project (funded by Italian Government) called “Genesis-D”1 (Global Environmental Network System of Information for Sustainable Development) that understanding the importance of the new user-centred approach wants to reengineering its own products.