A toolkit for applying a migration strategy: a case study

Many organizations manage their activities by using legacy systems. These are very important for them as they represent an important support for the achievement of the business goals. Numerous strategies have been proposed for migrating legacy systems toward modern architecture. By starting from approaches presented in the literature, this paper provides a reference schema to be applied for incrementally migrating a COBOL legacy system toward a modern technological platform. To efficiently applying the strategy, a toolkit has been implemented. It automatically performs the decomposition of the legacy software by identifying the software components to be encapsulated in different wrappers and creating new programs. Data flow analysis is used to identify the formal parameter in the new program interfaces. The strategy and the toolkit presented have been defined within the project M&S SW, a research project aiming to define new technological solutions to be transferred to ICT SMEs.