Architecting Enterprise Legacy System Migrations

The modern enterprise organization, that builds and maintains custom software solutions, depends on aging IT systems and applications for day-to-day operations. Migrating these applications and systems into new technologies is expensive and time-consuming. This talk will explore not only how these systems can be brought forward into modern technologies, but also how these systems can be rearchitected to make future transitions cheaper, easier, and faster. To accomplish these goals we need to redefine ‘software application’ to mean: an encapsulation of business logic; and build business logic layers than can have user interfaces and data access implementations bolted on and off whenever it is required. IT also needs to start talking to business about maintenance and upgrades before the first line of code is written. Understanding that software applications don’t last forever, just like an automobile, they require increasingly more maintenance the longer they stay in service. The modern enterprise continues to endure serious security risks due to the inability to quickly retire and replace legacy systems. Implementing processes outlined in this research will mitigate this risk. This sentence clearly describes the topic. A public audience may not be familiar with this phrase. Can you define this term and/or give an example of a modern enterprise organization to make sure everyone understands? Also, how does this phrase relate the phrase used in your title? You may need to use consistent terms and/or define the term used in your title as well. This sentence clearly describes the problem. This sentence clearly describes the proposed solutions (bringing systems “forward” and “re-architecting”)

A Product Line Systems Engineering Process for Variability Identification and Reduction

Software Product Line Engineering has attracted attention in the last two decades due to its promising capabilities to reduce costs and time to market through reuse of requirements and components. In practice, developing system level product lines in a large-scale company is not an easy task as there may be thousands of variants and multiple disciplines involved. The manual reuse of legacy system models at domain engineering to build reusable system libraries and configurations of variants to derive target products can be infeasible. To tackle this challenge, a Product Line Systems Engineering process is proposed. Specifically, the process extends research in the System Orthogonal Variability Model to support hierarchical variability modeling with formal definitions; utilizes Systems Engineering concepts and legacy system models to build the hierarchy for the variability model and to identify essential relations between variants; and finally, analyzes the identified relations to reduce the number of variation points. The process, which is automated by computational algorithms, is demonstrated through an illustrative example on generalized Rolls-Royce aircraft engine control systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of the process in the reduction of variation points, it is further applied to case studies in different engineering domains at different levels of complexity. Subject to system model availability, reduction of 14% to 40% in the number of variation points are demonstrated in the case studies.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables; submitted to the IEEE Systems Journal on 3rd June 201

Transformation framework for legacy software migration

A legacy system is a system that is built using old technologies, but it is still beneficial to an organization. However, today it is facing a great challenge to meet the demands of current applications. Organizations are coming under great pressure to decide on the fate of the legacy system as they try to cope with the changing scenario. Among the alternatives offered are: discarding the legacy system and replacing it with a totally new system, allowing the system to deteriorate until the organization is out of business, redeveloping the system, or reengineering the system. Reengineering seems to offer the best solution to the challenge. This paper focuses on transformation, which is one of the reengneering technologies for migrating a legacy system toward an evolvable system. A few legacy software transformation approaches are discussed. A framework for legacy software migration that combines the strengths of each of the described approaches is proposed

Towards a re-engineering method for web services architectures

Recent developments in Web technologies – in particular through the Web services framework – have greatly enhanced the flexible and interoperable implementation of service-oriented software architectures. Many older Web-based and other distributed software systems will be re-engineered to a Web services-oriented platform. Using an advanced e-learning system as our case study, we investigate central aspects of a re-engineering approach for the Web services platform. Since our aim is to provide components of the legacy system also as services in the new platform, re-engineering to suit the new development paradigm is as important as re-engineering to suit the new architectural requirements

To Host a Legacy System to the Web

The dramatic improvements in global interconectivity due to intranets, extranets and the Internet has led to many enterprises to consider migrating legacy systems to a web based systems. While data remapping is relatively straightforward in most cases, greater challenges lie in adapting legacy application software. This research effort describes an experiment in which a legacy system is migrated to a web-client/server environment. First, this thesis reports on the difficulties and issues arising when porting a legacy system International Invoice (IIMM) to a web-client/server environment. Next, this research analyzes the underlying issues, and offer cautionary guidance to future migrators and finally this research effort builds a prototype of the legacy system on a web client/server environment that demonstrates effective strategies to deal with these issues

Requirements analysis gamification in legacy system replacement projects

The replacement of legacy systems in the public sector is fraught with project delays, budgetary overruns, technological and business process complexities. Moreover, the software implemented to replace legacy systems is developed or configured to largely mimic their features and functionality in order to minimize the disruption to organizational operations that accompanies the introduction of new technology. When the requirements for legacy replacement primarily replicate existing applications and processes, opportunities for business process improvement are bypassed. However, it is difficult for practitioners to transcend the business and systems models prevalent in their organizations for many years. The challenge is to support them to overcome such a difficulty, and be creative and engaged during requirements discussions. Our research aims to evaluate the utility of gamifying the requirements activities during legacy replacement projects for scoping replacement systems efforts in a way that takes advantage of opportunities for innovation while minimizing unnecessary changes to the status quo. The supplementation of the requirements process with game elements is explored in our research through the development of a requirements discussion game (RE-PROVO) and its evaluation by practitioners in two government agencies. Our findings reveal that key elements of RE-PROVO, including competition, anonymity and roleplay, encourage a more critical evaluation of business requirements in legacy replacement projects, but that the success of requirements gamification is contingent on a proper incentivization model which takes organizational culture and values into account

Evaluating Legacy System Migration Technologies through Empirical Studies

We present two controlled experiments conducted with master students and practitioners and a case study conducted with practitioners to evaluate the use of MELIS (Migration Environment for Legacy Information Systems) for the migration of legacy COBOL programs to the web. MELIS has been developed as an Eclipse plug-in within a technology transfer project conducted with a small software company [16]. The partner company has developed and marketed in the last 30 years several COBOL systems that need to be migrated to the web, due to the increasing requests of the customers. The goal of the technology transfer project was to define a systematic migration strategy and the supporting tools to migrate these COBOL systems to the web and make the partner company an owner of the developed technology. The goal of the controlled experiments and case study was to evaluate the effectiveness of introducing MELIS in the partner company and compare it with traditional software development environments. The results of the overall experimentation show that the use of MELIS increases the productivity and reduces the gap between novice and expert software engineers