Towards a Framework to Assess Legacy Systems

Many organizations nowadays own a number of legacy software systems and maintain them functional to fulfill their daily business operations. However, legacy systems cannot always accommodate newly emerging business needs, thus might negatively impact organization´s shares in the market. So, CEOs need to recognize the limitation of their legacy systems and identify the best action for dealing with these systems considering possible options at hand. One possible solution is to replace the entire system with brand new off-the-shelf systems. Equally, improving the architecture of a legacy system can be a valid option to consider as well. A third option can be via using middleware to encapsulate legacy system. The decision for which approach to follow when dealing with legacy software system must be made based on through investigation of the nature of the system. This paper describes a framework to assess legacy software systems in order to support CEOs to make an informed decision to either keep or replace their existing legacy systems. The framework assesses legacy systems considering four main contexts namely, support, business, architecture, and technology. We have applied the proposed framework to assess a legacy system of an organization in the region of Saudi Arabia to evaluate its usefulness and practicality. The results of the conducted study were in favor of re-architecting the system of the organization as the most appropriate option in the light of the values given for each context.