Concept-Based Engineering of Situation-Specific Migration Methods

Abstract

Software migration methods enable to reuse legacy systems by transferring them into new environments. Thereby, the method used needs to fit to the project’s situation by considering conceptual differences between the source and target environment and automating parts of the migra- tion whenever suitable. Using an inappropriate migration method may lead to a decreased software quality or increased effort. Various method engineering approaches have been proposed to support the development of situation-specific migration methods. However, most do not provide a sufficient degree of flexibility when developing a method or fall short in guiding the endeavor. To address this problem, we introduce a situational method engineering framework to guide the development of model-driven migration methods by assembling predefined buildings blocks. The development is centered around the identification of concepts within a legacy system and the selection of suitable migration strategies. We evaluate the framework by an industrial project in which we migrated a legacy system from the domain of real estates to a new environment.