A Holistic Evaluation Strategy for the Modernization of Legacy Systems

Service Oriented Architecture has developed into a current paradigm for business application solutions. This development calls for a need to modernize legacy systems which store the fundamental business procedures for large organisations. The primary goal of this paper is to present a holistic evaluation strategy which can be used to assess the end product of a modernization process applied to a legacy system, specifically a data service in an SOA. The evaluation strategy is comprised of a three-legged approach. The first evaluation leg consists of the analysis of the quality of service of the data service generated by the modernization process. The second leg investigates the effort required by the developer to modernize the original legacy code, depending on the type of modernization approach selected. The third leg measures the efficacy of the data services generated by empirical testing upon completion of the modernization process. The envisaged contribution is the development of an evaluation strategy that ensures successful modernization of legacy systems by assessing each of the major components of the modernization process. Index Terms – Quality of service (QoS), Software evaluation, Modernization