Assessing Legacy System Migration Technologies through Controlled Experiments

We present the results of two controlled experiments aimed at assessing MELIS (migration environment for legacy information systems), a tool developed within a technology transfer project to support the migration of COBOL legacy information systems to a J2EE web-enabled multi-tier target architecture. The first controlled experiment was conducted within an academic research laboratory with master students in Computer Science at the University of Salerno, while a replicated experiment was conducted in the laboratory of our partner company with both professional programmers and academic researchers. The results revealed that the use of MELIS decrease the time to migrate legacy systems to the web with respect to the use of traditional development tools. Also, less expert software engineers benefit more of the use of MELIS.