A framework for immigrating existing software to new software development environments

We have investigated the problem of immigrating software artifacts from one software development environment (SDE) to another for the purpose of upgrading to new SDEs as technology improves, while continuing development or maintenance of existing software systems. We rst taxonomize the larger problem of data migration, to establish the scope of immigration. We then classify SDEs in terms of the ease of immigrating software artifacts out of the data repository of the source SDE without knowledge of its internal representation. A framework is presented for constructing automatic immigration tools as utilities provided by destination SDEs. We describe a speciic immigration tool, called Marvelizer, that we have implemented as part of the Marvel SDE and discuss our experience using the tool.