A structured legacy to SOA migration process and its evaluation in practice

Legacy to Service-Oriented Architecture migration approaches have been extensively researched over the last decade, primarily to reuse the valuable business logic that resides within legacy applications. Interestingly, most of the proposed approaches fail to cover the complete process from the technological, organizational and business perspectives. This paper presents a structured six-phase process that covers both migration planning and execution, and does so by considering the aforementioned perspectives. Furthermore, within each of the six phases of the process, we present a rationale to justify the need of each phase, current practices within each phase, and challenges that require further attention. The proposed structured process is then evaluated by (i) migrating features of two simple yet representative applications to SOA, and (ii) by mapping activities reported in literature. Based on our findings, we believe that the proposed structured process is successfully fitting to capture the essence of the activities that are performed within the legacy to SOA migration domain by combining various perspectives.