Towards Quality-Driven Software Migration.
Jan Jelschen, Gaurav Pandey, Andreas J. Winter · 2014
Long-running software systems suffer from software erosion, due to their constant evolution to meet new or changing requirements, severely limiting their maintainability. Migrating software systems, i.e. transferring legacy systems into modern environments and technologies without changing functionality [FWE+12], is a key technique of software evolution, and serves to keep existing software systems operational. Structured migrations allow for transferring established software solutions to cutting edge technology, without having to consider the significantly higher risks of developing a new system from scratch. Reliable predictions regarding long-term trends of software systems ’ quality are a prerequisite to make sensible decisions between software migration or redevelopment strategies, which enable a system’s continued development, evolution, and operation. Especially when planning to migrate software systems, and choosing appropriate tools, a prognosis of project-specific quality properties of the system after migration is required. To assess and compare software quality before and after language migrations, like from COBOL to Java, a major obstacle to overcome is the paradigm shift between procedural and object-oriented programming that occurs (or should occur) when trans-lating between these languages. For example, any measures which try to capture object-oriented