Migration of a Legacy Procedural System to Service-Oriented Computing Using Feature Analysis

Transforming a legacy system to operate within a service-oriented web environment requires an identification of features and services within the system. In order to move a procedural legacy system to a service-oriented web environment, the legacy system must first be transformed to an object-oriented based system. This new object-oriented system´s features and services must be identified and then transformed to Web services. This paper presents an approach where a tool first analyses data and control dependencies among component files which, along with selected domain analysis techniques, then identifies related groups of components that offer features and identifies related aggregated component groups that offer services. A case study of a 100 000 line telecommunication system demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach in identifying relevant services and features. Using these techniques, feature identification can, to some degree, be automated unlike other feature identification methods which tend to be heavily dependent on user expertise to select appropriate web service features from a list of candidates.