During its life, a legacy system is subjected to many maintenance activities, which cause degradation of the quality of the system: When this degradation exceeds a critical threshold, the legacy system needs to be reengineered. In order to preserve the asset represented by the legacy system, the familiarity with it gained by the system's maintainers and users, and the continuity of execution of current operations during the reengineering process, the system needs to be reengineered gradually. Moreover, each program needs to be reengineered within a short period of time. The paper proposes a reengineering process model, which is applied to an in-use legacy system to confirm that the process satisfies previous requirements and to measure its effectiveness. The reengineered system replaced the legacy one to the satisfaction of all the stakeholders; the reengineering process also had a satisfactory impact on the quality of the system. Finally, this paper contributes to validate the cause-effect relationship between the reengineering process and overcoming the aging symptoms of a software system.
This project started from the necessity to create a taxonomic classification for the management of the Learning Objects (LO) repository used by the LCMS platforms. The classification obtained is now in use for the OSEL project (OSEL website -http://www.osel.it). The OSEL project is financed by the Statistics Department of the University of Bari. The aim is to analyze and to promote the introduction of blended elearning in the academic world. Many LCMSs Open-source platforms have been studied, tested and put at users' disposal. The support to the ADL/SCORM (see http://www.adlnet.org) given by all the platforms has allowed the integration in the OSEL web of the repository service, along with the services already in use (forum, newsletter, glossary, database). The aim is to gather and to catalogue the LO products proposed in the various courses and managed by the learners on the web. Starting from Wiley's (2000) and Redeker's (2003) taxonomies, the research group studied the OSEL Taxonomy and presented the project of a web application able to classify the LO and to place them in order into the repository.
This paper describes a process of gradual reengineering of the procedural components of a legacy system. The process is integrated and completed by the data reengineering process analyzed in a previous paper by the same authors. The proposed method enables the legacy system to be gradually emptied into the reengineered system, without needing to either duplicate the legacy system or freeze it. The process consists of evolving the legacy system components toward firstly a restored system and then toward the reengineered system. Meanwhile, the legacy system can coexist with both the restored and the reengineered parts. By the end of the process, a single system will be in existence: the reengineered one. The method has been applied to reengineer a real system and demonstrated its ability to: support gradual reengineering, maintain the system at work during the process, minimize the need to freeze maintenance requests, renew the operative environment of the reengineered system with respect to the legacy system and, finally, eliminate all the system's aging symptoms.
Executive SummaryThe aim of this paper is to transform the necessity for "integrated ICT training" in study courses within universities into a possible action plan which indicates both the pros and cons of the use of IT in the strategies, services and products to be used from a cost point of view.This will enable an evaluation of the Return On Investment (ROI) using the new concept of Yield Index "e-lYI" (e-learning Yield Index), introduced in this study. The Yield Index "e-lYI" suggests an original way to evaluate the implementation of e-learning methodologies into campus based environments; still, the new index will help professionals involved in the management of the transition from the "classical" university structure to the innovative structure needed by the elearning implementation. These results should interest any Faculty or University which is planning to introduce e-learning methodology to its didactic organization.In this study, a Pilot Course, delivered in "Blended" learning model, will be taken into consideration to estimate the costs. In the subsequent phase the ROI will be assessed for the Pilot course and compared to the ROI of a classical course by the use of "e-lYI".Furthermore, it would therefore be extremely interesting to consider the "e-lYI" in a University administration that decided to adopt an Open Source Learning Management Systems. Open Source, therefore, will be the final element of innovation and experimentation in the evaluation process.Keywords: e-lYI, ROI, e-learning, costs, evaluation, open source. Introduction -The ContextIn the last five years, European Public Administration, in particular that within universities, has shown renewed interest in applications geared to information technology training. Its subsequent rapid development has helped accelerate and optimize knowledge of IT, overcoming the barriers of time and space which are characteristic of traditional training.The European Union Council, during a meeting in Lisbon in 2000, recommended that national governments organize a rapid acceleration in IT training to adopt the levels necessaryMaterial published as part of this journal, either on-line or in print, is copyrighted by the publisher of the Journal of Information Technology Education. Permission to make digital or paper copy of part or all of these works for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage AND that copies 1) bear this notice in full and 2) give the full citation on the first page. It is permissible to abstract these works so long as credit is given. To copy in all other cases or to republish or to post on a server or to redistribute to lists requires specific permission and payment of a fee. Contact Editor@JITE.org to request redistribution permission. Measuring the Economic Benefits of E-Learning 330for the European society of the third millennium.Following this recommendation, the European Community Commission adopted an initiative entitled "e-Learning -consid...
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