Enterprise Framework for the Disciplined Evolution of Legacy Systems

Organizations that migrate legacy systems to distributed, open system environments or to a single product line of systems often fail because they concentrate on a narrow set of software issues without fully considering a broader set of enterprisewide management and technical issues. This article describes an enterprise framework that characterizes the global environment in which system evolution takes place and provides insight into the activities, processes, and work products that shape the disciplined evolution of legacy systems. The following checklists help identify critical enterprise issues that correspond to each of the framework's elements.