Praxisfallbeispiel: Modernisierung einer Mainframe-Anwendung durch eine verteilte SOA

Auch heute noch sind Legacy-Anwendungen auf Basis von Mainframe-DBMS wie Adabas und zugehörigen Programmiersprachen wie Natural häufig produktiv. Sie sind jedoch oft nur schlecht mit neuen Unternehmensanwendungen integriert. Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt in einem Fallbeispiel die Modernisierung einer solchen Anwendung unter Einsatz von Web Services als Basis ihrer Integration in eine verteilte, Service-orientierte Architektur (SOA)

Analysis of Legacy System in Software Application Development: A Comparative Survey

Software evolution is one of the challenging issues in today’s business environment. It is necessary for the organizations, which make use of Information, and Communication Technologies will have to align their business processes to compete with global business. The existing large software systems (“legacy” systems) have never been built to cope with the current business requirement for their poor coding, design structures, logic and documentation. Moreover, Legacy applications have various problems such as lack of up to-date documentation, skilled man power, resources of the Legacy applications, and high maintenance costs. Even though the Legacy system is obsolete, it contains detailed business rules and in continuous use, because it satisfies the users' needs and forms the backbone of the information flow of organization. One of the possible solutions is to refactor or modernize those systems into a new platform. It is necessary to analyse the existing legacy system for better understanding the business logic and its functionalities. This paper analyses various techniques proposed for understanding Legacy systems in existence

A product design framework for one-of-a-kind production using integrated quality function deployment and operational research techniques

The process of product design as an early stage of new product development provides systematic approaches that can lead to the success of a company’s competitive strategy in the current turbulent market. By launching an efficient product design procedure can result in the reduction of engineering modifications, cost and production time. One-of-a-Kind Product (OKP) is known as a particular manufacturing system of new product design and development with emphasis on the special order concept. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a comprehensive design framework with cross-functional team members that leads to the development of new or improved products. QFD starts with the House of Quality (HOQ) as an organizing matrix to identify the customers’ requirements (CRs) and translate them into the technical attributes (TAs) of the product and followed by determining the target values for the sets of technical attributes. An evaluation approach to determine the relative importance of CRs and TAs should be considered. In previous researches, the traditional methods such as simple scoring method and application of operational research techniques such as Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) were reported to weigh the requirements and attributes. Despite the obvious inner-relationships among the elements, considering the HOQ as a hierarchical system may be inefficient. In addition, the contradictory effects of a TA on two or more CRs, is the problem that has been neglected. Here, a mathematical model was developed for calculating the TAs target values. A case study (dry gas filter, Namdaran Petro-Gas Industries (NPI™)) is presented to exhibit and verify the procedure of OKP product design. Initially, the framework was developed by integrating QFD-operational research (Analytic Network Process (ANP)) as a systematic method for improvement of dry gas filter design. Interview and study of documents were used to identify the CRs. A robust evaluation on customers’ priority and attributes’ importance with respect to inner-relationships among criteria/sub-criteria was performed. Furthermore, the effects of TAs on CRs with regard to their direction (positive/negative) were considered as the fundamental for developing a Multi-Objective Decision Model (MODM) to be used for determining the TAs target values. For this purpose, the fuzzy conversion scaling technique followed by formulating the partial satisfaction separately was applied. Modified TOPSIS was used to select the basic design among the available designs for further modification. Later, the process continues with the second phase, translating the TAs into the key parts. The available options (retailers) to supply the key parts were identified. As the normal procedure of QFD the relative importance’s of key parts and the options were determined. Finally, a zero-one goal programming was presented to select the optimum options for each key part subject to the budget constraint. Overall, the developed QFD-ANP framework provides a systematic approach that has the potential to be used for designing OKP product

Development of an online collaborative working environment for design and manufacturing

This research is to develop a novel collaborative working environment (CWE) for manufacturing and design using advanced Web/Internet technologies such as Web Service, Grid Service and other related software tools/packages. To achieve the above, the following research modules are developed by the author: A service oriented framework for computer aid design, which acts as an online collaboration system, has been developed with the utilisation of the latest technology, Web Service. The concept of Service-Oriented Architecture has been implemented in the framework. Users from anywhere in the world can join the design process from their PCs, no matter what operation system they are using. The service-oriented system has the capability of going through firewalls and can afford multi-users due to the characteristics of Web service. Also the loose-coupling structure makes the system very easy to be updated. Another module for the CWE is to solve the software sharing problem when the platform is used among several geographically dispersed users or organisations. A software package bank system has been developed, which utilised the ideology of service oriented approach and successfully solved traditional problems in this field. Based on the outcomes mentioned above, the research finally developed a more powerful infrastructure using Grid service, which is a further development of Grid computing and Web service. The Grid service is considered to be the most important future solvent for Internet

Factors Affecting Success in Migration of Legacy Systems to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) - Shared Experiences from Five Case Companies

Background: The term ‘legacy systems’ refers to existing Information Systems that have been deployed in the past and have been running critical business processes within an enterprise in its current IT architecture. Based on their important role, legacy systems are considered the heart of a company’s operating enterprise system and therefore are of significant business value to the company. Therefore IT architects have not neglected the value these existing assets can bring to the adoption of service-oriented architecture and have been studying different methods and factors to migrate the legacy investments into the new architecture and take advantage of their business value. However, not in all cases has the process of migrating legacy systems into SOA been successful. In fact, the level of success in adapting the legacy systems in a company with the new service-oriented architecture is dependant on some factors which vary from one legacy infrastructure and series of business processes to another. There is no quick fix to transforming the existing legacy assets which highlights the fact that considering the right factors to reach legacy system migration success in a specific company is of key value. Therefore, we hereby studied the factors influencing success of migrating these legacy investments into SOA in five different companies which include a Large European Bank, SAS, a Large globally-known Company in Sweden, Sandvik AB and a large UK Bank. Purpose: To identify factors affecting successful migration of legacy systems into SOA in five companies. Method: The main adopted research method in this study has been interviews for different case studies. Through separate interviews, critical success factors of migrating legacy systems into SOA have been collected and identified in each case. Finally collected results are analyzed and presented as the recognized factors affecting successful migration of legacy assets into SOA in five different enterprises with their own Information System infrastructures. Conclusion: The success factors identified include potential of legacy systems for being migrated, strategy of migration, SOA governance, the business process of the company, budgeting and resources, legacy architecture, close monitoring, dependence on commercial products, information architecture, testing and technical skills of the personnel. Out of all these factors, only three factors have been applied and mentioned by all the case companies in this study, which are the potential of legacy systems for being migrated into SOA, strategy of migration and SOA Governance

A comprehensive evaluation framework for system modernization : a case study using data services

Modernization is a solution to migrate cumbersome existing systems to a new architecture for improved longevity of business processes. Three modernization approaches exist. White-box and black-box modernization are distinct from one another. Grey-box modernization is a hybrid of the white-box and black-box approaches. Modernization can be utilised to create data services for a Service Oriented Architecture. Since it is unclear which modernization approach is more suitable for the development of data services, a comprehensive evaluation framework is proposed to evaluate which of the white- or black-box approaches is more suitable. The comprehensive framework consists of three evaluation components. Firstly, developer effort to modernize existing code is measured by acknowledged software metrics. Secondly, the quality of the data services is measured against identified Quality of Service criteria for data services in particular. Thirdly, the effectiveness of the modernized data services is measured through usability evaluations. By inspection of the combination of application of each of the evaluation components, a recommended approach is identified for the modernization of data services. The comprehensive framework was successfully employed to compare the white-box and black-box modernization approaches applied to a case study. Results indicated that had only a single evaluation component been used, inconclusive results of the more suitable approach may have been obtained. The findings of this research contribute a comprehensive evaluation framework which can be applied to compare modernization approaches and measure modernization success

A comprehensive evaluation framework for system modernization : a case study using data services

Modernization is a solution to migrate cumbersome existing systems to a new architecture for improved longevity of business processes. Three modernization approaches exist. White-box and black-box modernization are distinct from one another. Grey-box modernization is a hybrid of the white-box and black-box approaches. Modernization can be utilised to create data services for a Service Oriented Architecture. Since it is unclear which modernization approach is more suitable for the development of data services, a comprehensive evaluation framework is proposed to evaluate which of the white- or black-box approaches is more suitable. The comprehensive framework consists of three evaluation components. Firstly, developer effort to modernize existing code is measured by acknowledged software metrics. Secondly, the quality of the data services is measured against identified Quality of Service criteria for data services in particular. Thirdly, the effectiveness of the modernized data services is measured through usability evaluations. By inspection of the combination of application of each of the evaluation components, a recommended approach is identified for the modernization of data services. The comprehensive framework was successfully employed to compare the white-box and black-box modernization approaches applied to a case study. Results indicated that had only a single evaluation component been used, inconclusive results of the more suitable approach may have been obtained. The findings of this research contribute a comprehensive evaluation framework which can be applied to compare modernization approaches and measure modernization success

Knowledge-driven Migration to Services

Vliet, J.C. [Promotor]Lago, P. [Copromotor