How do professionals perceive legacy systems and software modernization?

Existing research in legacy system modernization has traditionally focused on technical challenges, and takes the standpoint that legacy systems are obsolete, yet crucial for an organization's operation. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether practitioners in the industry also share this perception. This paper describes the outcome of an exploratory study in which 26 industrial practitioners were interviewed on what makes a software system a legacy system, what the main drivers are that lead to the modernization of such systems, and what challenges are faced during the modernization process. The findings of the interviews have been validated by means of a survey with 198 respondents. The results show that practitioners value their legacy systems highly, the challenges they face are not just technical, but also include business and organizational aspects.

[1]  Niels P. Veerman.  Revitalizing modifiability of legacy assets , 2004, J. Softw. Maintenance Res. Pract..

[2]  Aniello Cimitile,et al.  Decomposing legacy programs: a first step towards migrating to client-server platforms , 1998, Proceedings. 6th International Workshop on Program Comprehension. IWPC'98 (Cat. No.98TB100242).

[3]  Giuseppe Scanniello,et al.  Evaluating legacy system migration technologies through empirical studies , 2009, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[4]  Bing Wu,et al.  The Butterfly Methodology: a gateway-free approach for migrating legacy information systems , 1997, Proceedings. Third IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (Cat. No.97TB100168).

[5]  Jia Liu,et al.  Feature oriented refactoring of legacy applications , 2006, ICSE.

[6]  Hanifa Shah,et al.  Technical Opinion: Viewpoints on legacy systems , 1999, CACM.

[7]  ISO / IEC 25010 : 2011 Systems and software engineering — Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation ( SQuaRE ) — System and software quality models , 2013 .

[8]  Nahid Golafshani,et al.  Understanding Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research , 2003 .

[9]  Arie van Deursen,et al.  Research Issues in the Renovation of Legacy Systems , 1999, FASE.

[10]  Maryam Razavian,et al.  A Survey of SOA Migration in Industry , 2011, ICSOC.

[11]  F. P. Coyle,et al.  Cobol: perception and reality , 1997 .

[12]  Bruce W. Weide,et al.  Reverse Engineering of Legacy Code Exposed , 1995, 1995 17th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[13]  Ian Warren,et al.  The Renaissance of Legacy Systems , 1999, Practitioner Series.

[14]  Stephan Murer,et al.  Managed Evolution: A Strategy for Very Large Information Systems , 2010 .

[15]  Per Runeson,et al.  Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering , 2009, Empirical Software Engineering.

[16]  Wilhelm Hasselbring,et al.  The Dublo architecture pattern for smooth migration of business information systems: an experience report , 2004, Proceedings. 26th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[17]  Asil A. Almonaies,et al.  Legacy System Evolution towards Service-Oriented Architecture , 2010 .

[18]  Ed Briggs.  The burden of legacy. , 2011, The Florida nurse.

[19]  Harry M. Sneed.  Software Renewal: A case Study , 1984, IEEE Software.

[20]  Uwe Zdun,et al.  Piecemeal legacy migrating with an architectural pattern language: a case study , 2002, J. Softw. Maintenance Res. Pract..

[21]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger,et al.  Principles of survey research: part 5: populations and samples , 2002, SOEN.

[22]  Eleni Stroulia,et al.  From legacy to Web through interaction modeling , 2002, International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2002. Proceedings..

[23]  E. Burton Swanson,et al.  Characteristics of application software maintenance , 1978, CACM.

[24]  James M. Bieman,et al.  Aspect-Oriented Refactoring of Legacy Applications: An Evaluation , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[25]  Ian Warren,et al.  The Renaissance of Legacy Systems: Method Support for Software-System Evolution , 1999 .

[26]  Michael Stonebraker,et al.  Migrating Legacy Systems: Gateways, Interfaces, and the Incremental Approach , 1995 .

[27]  Harry M. Sneed,et al.  Risks involved in reengineering projects , 1999, Sixth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (Cat. No.PR00303).

[28]  Niels Veerman.  Revitalizing modifiability of legacy assets: Research Articles , 2004 .

[29]  Maryam Razavian,et al.  A Frame of Reference for SOA Migration , 2010, ServiceWave.

[30]  Marco Torchiano,et al.  Migration of information systems in the Italian industry: A state of the practice survey , 2011, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[31]  W. Stephen Adolph,et al.  Cash Cow in the Tar Pit: Reengineering a Legacy System , 1996, IEEE Softw..

[32]  Keith H. Bennett,et al.  Legacy Systems: Coping with Success , 1995, IEEE Softw..

[33]  Daniela E. Damian,et al.  Selecting Empirical Methods for Software Engineering Research , 2008, Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering.

[34]  Jurriaan Hage,et al.  Migrating a large scale legacy application to SOA: Challenges and lessons learned , 2013, 2013 20th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE).

[35]  Marin Litoiu,et al.  Migrating Legacy Applications - Challenges in Service Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing Environments , 2013, Migrating Legacy Applications.

[36]  Alex Quilici.  Reverse Engineering of Legacy Systems: A Path Toward Success , 1995, 1995 17th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[37]  Marten van Sinderen.  Challenges and solutions in enterprise computing , 2008, Enterp. Inf. Syst..

[38]  Meir M. Lehman,et al.  A Model of Large Program Development , 1976, IBM Syst. J..

[39]  Arie van Deursen,et al.  A Systematic Survey of Program Comprehension through Dynamic Analysis , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[40]  Alessandro Bianchi,et al.  Iterative Reengineering of Legacy Systems , 2003, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[41]  Michael L. Brodie.  The Promise of Distributed Computing and the Challenges of Legacy Systems , 1992, BNCOD.

[42]  Jurriaan Hage,et al.  Industrial Perception of Legacy Software System and their Modernization , 2014 .

[43]  Jane Grimson,et al.  A Survey of Research into Legacy System Migration , 2007 .

[44]  Bing Wu,et al.  Legacy Information Systems: Issues and Directions , 1999, IEEE Softw..

[45]  Cornelia Boldyreff,et al.  Modelling the evolution of legacy systems to Web-based systems , 2004, J. Softw. Maintenance Res. Pract..

[46]  Grace A. Lewis,et al.  Modernizing Legacy Systems - Software Technologies, Engineering Processes, and Business Practices , 2003, SEI series in software engineering.

[47]  Arie van Deursen,et al.  Realizing service migration in industry—lessons learned , 2011, J. Softw. Evol. Process..

[48]  Michael Stonebraker,et al.  DARWIN: On the Incremental Migration of Legacy Information Systems , 1993, GTE Laboratories Incorporated.

[49]  Philippe Thiran,et al.  Wrapper-based evolution of legacy information systems , 2006, TSEM.

[50]  A. Strauss,et al.  The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research aldine de gruyter , 1968 .

[51]  Giuseppe Scanniello,et al.  Developing legacy system migration methods and tools for technology transfer , 2008 .

[52]  Keith H. Bennett,et al.  Software maintenance and evolution: a roadmap , 2000, ICSE '00.

[53]  Nelson Weiderman,et al.  Approaches to Legacy System Evolution. , 1997 .

[54]  A. Mehta,et al.  Evolving legacy system features into fine-grained components , 2002, Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE 2002.

[55]  Philippe Kruchten,et al.  Using grounded theory to study the experience of software development , 2011, Empirical Software Engineering.