A Systematic Mapping Study on Legacy System Modernization

Abstract Legacy system modernization has gained increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners, mainly due to the need of maintaining legacy systems towards business needs and technology advances. In this way, a set of techniques, tools and terms related to software modernization have been proposed-although they have not been consolidated yet. This hinders the characterization of real modernization scenarios according to the existing literature. This paper synthesize the existing contributions related to software modernization by means of a mapping study that characterizes the main results in terms of proposed processes, techniques, and tools. As one of our main findings, we report a lack of empirical studies trying to understand the benefits of using the existing approaches for software modernizatio