A framework for immigrating existing software to new software development environments

A discussion is given on 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. The authors taxonomise the larger problem of data migration, to establish the scope of immigration. They classify SDEs in terms of the ease of immigrating software artifacts from 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. They describe a specific immigration tool, called Marvelizer, implemented as part of the Marvel SDE and discuss experience using the tool