IEEE TENCON - 2008 Modernizing a legacy system to SOA - Feature analysis approach

With the introduction of revolutionary concept of software-as-a-service, for a number of industries, corporate IT strategy has shifted from a silo mentality with independent and self-contained operating products to a more integrated service vision. However the fact remains that legacy systems with their native operating platforms are still the lifeblood of business. They often represent years of intellectual capital, millions of dollars in investment and represent a vault of undocumented business processes. One of the biggest challenges being faced by the IT divisions today is to review the structure of legacy systems to bring them onto the service oriented computing paradigm. This paper presents our analysis and experience at Broadridge in modernizing a large scale legacy system to a service oriented environment. Feature analysis techniques were employed for the reverse engineering phase since the output of this technique would produce requirement artifacts that will be a natural fit into the SOA based forward engineering phase.