Software Modernization and Replacement Decision Making in Industry: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Software modernization and replacement decisions are crucial to many organizations. They affect greatly to the success and well being of the organizations and their people. The decisions like that are usually presumed to be rational and based on facts. These decisions and how they are made tell much about the decision makers and the decision making tools available to them. Interviews of 29 software modernization decision makers or senior experts were analyzed in order to find out how the decisions were made and what models and tools were used. It turned out that decisions are not as rational as supposed. Intuition is the dominant factor in decision making. Formal software engineering oriented decision support methods are not used. Most decision makers did not see intuition as a preferable way to make decisions. This might be because the preferred values are rationality and formality. Since the use of intuition is not particularly valued it is not necessarily admitted or documented either. However, truthful description and justification of decisions is important both from the practical and ethical point of views.

Sensing: The elephant in the room of management learning

“…However, even if organizations get fully on board with openly incorporating and supporting sensory-based aspects of management learning, some managers may have difficulty overcoming years of school and corporate conditioning against sensing as a valid way of knowing. Learning to attend to sensing and interpret received signals may require breaking through barriers which include: preference for sequential reasoning style (Bakken et al, 2016), lack of sensory awareness (Krycka, 2014), not having adequate vocabulary to talk about sensory experiences (Taylor, 2002: 837), mistrusting one's senses (Dane, 2019), dismissing sensory perceptions (Burneko, 1997), discomfort with the process of mastery when it comes to sensing rather than analyzing (Ardichvili et al, 2003), getting over the established corporate social norms against sensing (Goldstein et al, 2008), and habitual denying of sensory input (Saarelainen et al, 2006).…”

“…We observed this idea in action with managers' 'trusting-not-trusting' dance in organizations, not relying openly on sensing as a source of knowing because of their perception that colleagues in the organization may not accept it. Several participants in our corporate workshops described their reluctance to bring insights based on 'having a sense for a situation' to their teammates and managers in fear of being ridiculed (Saarelainen et al, 2006). Sensing alone is 'just not good enough' in the corporate culture of quantitative approach, according to the software engineers in our workshops.…”

“…Not admitting to sensing as an essential dimension of management learning can lead to missing out on solutions and discoveries for the lack of a 'reasonable' justification, which may be more widely acceptable in management (Dörfler and Eden, 2019). Denying sensing as a source of information can also result in inaccurate accounts of the pathways to solutions, as managers can be required to provide an explanation of the way a solution was obtained (Saarelainen et al, 2006). Partially due to the standardized formal education in the Western world, and to the accepted cultural canons in management and computer science, sensing can be perceived as unfavorable, unprofessional, and less valued than rationality-based models, which is probably why managers are often reluctant to admit reliance on it (Sadler-Smith and Shefy, 2004b).…”

Untitled

“…The feasibility of exposing legacy system functionality as services within an SOA environment for an organization can be validated by Service Migration and Reuse Technique (SMART) processes [1]. The maintenance cost of legacy system would be between 40% and 90% of the total costs of the life cycle of the system [23]. Migrating the legacy systems to modernized and flexible technologies will yield -Reduced TCO (Total Cost Of Ownership), minimizes risk by moving off costly and outdated resources and adds value by maximizing the resource utilization of the infrastructure whereby energy efficiency is achieved.…”

Legacy Components Stability Assessment and Ranking using Software Maturity Index

“…Despite these challenges, organizations still find it difficult to abandon or replace them; rather, legacy modernization aimed at transformed the legacy application into modernized versions with features that address the fundamental challenges and possibly drive down maintenance cost is usually considered as the best option (Mishra, 2009). This fact is further affirmed in (Malinova, 2010), Comella-Dorda et al (2010); Saarelainen et al (2006) and Khadka et al (2010) where legacy modernization is reported as being more profitable than outright replacement with a caution that application must be replaced only when it can no longer be evolved.…”