Software Evolution of Legacy Systems - A Case Study of Soft-migration

Andreas Fürnweger, Martin Auer, Stefan Biffl
2016 Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems  
Software ages. It does so in relation to surrounding software components: as those are updated and modernized, static software becomes evermore outdated relative to them. Such legacy systems are either tried to be kept alive, or they are updated themselves, e.g., by re-factoring or porting-they evolve. Both approaches carry risks as well as maintenance cost profiles. In this paper, we give an overview of software evolution types and drivers; we outline costs and benefits of various evolution
more » ... roaches; and we present tools and frameworks to facilitate so-called "soft" migration approaches. Finally, we describe a case study of an actual platform migration, along with pitfalls and lessons learned. This paper thus aims to give software practitioners-both resource-allocating managers and choice-weighing engineers-a general framework with which to tackle software evolution and a specific evolution case study in a frequently-encountered Java-based setup. Fürnweger, A., Auer, M. and Biffl, S. Software Evolution of Legacy Systems -A Case Study of Soft-migration. In
doi:10.5220/0005771104130424 dblp:conf/iceis/FurnwegerAB16 fatcat:z6n5ole44jbjtcvk3fonp6lpq4