A Decision Process to Migrate Legacy Systems to SOA

The maintenance of legacy systems is not a trivial activity in Software Engineering. To tackle this problem, industry has to some extent migrated legacy systems to the Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Issues such as the time needed to plan and execute the migration as well as the complexity and risks of this decision are challenges to be faced in such cases. This paper presents a decision process to select a methodology to migrate legacy systems to SOA considering the organization profile. The decision process considers characteristics of the organization, its legacy systems and the new architecture to be implemented. A fieldwork was conducted to characterize the execution of the decision process in a Brazilian public company. The results obtained in the fieldwork provided evidences of the feasibility of the decision process.