Legacy systems represent fundamental assets for the organization which use them. A great number of them were developed using methodologies and programming languages that are now out of date, and, over the years these systems have been subjected to countless maintenance processes that inevitably caused progressive aging. This degeneration, together with the continual and often unexpected evolutions of the applicative domain that arise, leads to a high number of requests for maintenance that take longer and longer to satisfy as the system continues to age. Reengineering is necessary, indeed indispensable, to overcome many of the most serious aging symptoms. In addition to improving the quality of the system, the reengineering process should enable new functions to be introduced and new technologies to be adopted, to ensure efficient management of the information container in the legacy system.

The reengineering process is an intrusive one because it requires the data and the procedures to be restructured all at the same time. The legacy system obviously cannot stop working during the process. However, during reengineering of a procedure, the latter cannot be modified otherwise a loop would be created between the maintenance and reengineering processes that could end in an undesirable interaction. For this reason, the reengineering process has to be done on few procedures at a time and to last as short as possible, so that only requests for change having an impact on the few procedures currently being reengineered need to be frozen. The reengineered system components will coexist with all the others. Finally, the maintenance activities, if required, can be carried out on both the reengineered and legacy components, depending on the impacted procedures.

Our approach to reengineering is aimed at satisfying all these requirements.

   © 2003 Influence Technology Inc.