Assessing Software Replacement Success: An Industrial Case Study Applying Four Approaches

This paper describes an industrial case study assessing software replacement success and other effects. The target of assessments has been a large commercial legacy system for customer register management. The success of its replacement by its performed rewrite has been assessed via four approaches concerning: user satisfaction, strengths and problems of the system, problem surveillance and expert judgments. The approaches and metrics have been selected in cooperation with industrial experts in order that they would meet the needs of their organization. The assessments have been conducted by comparing the situations before and after the rewrite. They have included quality aspects. The applied approaches have supplemented each other well and results provided by them have been mainly consistent. The study has offered a wide view of the system replacement effects and lessons for the replacement assessment process improvement in industrial settings.