Towards a Framework to Assess Legacy Systems

Abstract

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.

Developing an Assessment Model of E-Government Software Assets for Maintenance Recommendations: A Case Study in BKD Bandung

“…Based on the kinds of literature review, the different approaches for deciding the most appropriate strategy for software maintenance have been proposed [6,7,8,9]. It was found that two essential aspects are used to decide the software maintenance recommendation i.e., business value and technical value.…”

“…It was found that two essential aspects are used to decide the software maintenance recommendation i.e., business value and technical value. The business value represents the critical of the software for an organization [1,3,6,7,8,9]. Also, the technical value represents the condition or system quality included hardware, application software and software support [1,3,6,7,9].…”

“…Ramson [6], for instance, using three measurement aspect i.e., technical quality, business value, and organization characteristic. De Lucia [7], Cimitile [8], and Alkazemi [9] used two measurement aspect i.e. business value and technical value.…”

“…The term "ordinary maintenance, adaptive maintenance, and elimination' is proposed by De Lucia [7]. Cimitile [8] introduced the terms "extraordinary maintenance and reengineering', and Alkazemi [9] used the term "re-architecting and replacement".…”

Model Penilaian Perangkat Lunak E-Government untuk Rekomendasi Pemeliharaan (Studi Kasus: BKPSDM Ketapang)

“…Beberapa model penilaian perangkat lunak yang ditujukan untuk rekomendasi evolusinya sudah pernah dikembangkan oleh peneliti sebelumnya, antara lain; reengineering [6], re-architecture [7], Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) [8]. Dari…”