Tool assisted Agile approach for Legacy application Migration

Abstract

Many organizations rely on legacy applications for critical business pro- cesses, even though it incurs a huge cost due to obsolete hardware, software, compiler and the like. Replacing the business critical legacy requires extensive expertise to understand business requirements, esti- mate and test coupled with high cost. To ensure a strict cost budget of legacy migration projects, migration specialists need assistance to understand the facts of the legacy application component in a short span of time to estimate and deliver the target components. Avail- able program assistance tools do not address the needs to migrate the legacy applications. We have designed an effective framework to extract the run-time behaviour of the legacy application like function point, complexity, memory accesses and the like so as to estimate the scope and requirements of an application. The framework contains support to comprehend existing legacy applications, develop and test the target application with business-rules, non-functional requirements (NFR), test data, etc. Then we have proposed a tool assisted Agile way-of-working principles by augmenting our tool-set to migrate the legacy application quickly and effciently. The target components can also be validated co- existentially by exchanging live data with the existing legacy. Designed toolset is built on an open-source dynamic instrumentation framework and can be plugged to a wide variety of run-time environments.