Evolving Legacy Systems Towards E-Business

In e-business, addressing the technical issues alone is not enough to drive the evolution of existing legacy applications, but it is necessary to consider problems concerning the strict relationship that exists between the evolution of the legacy system and the evolution of the e-business process. In order to support the evolution, this chapter proposes a strategy for extracting the requirements for a legacy system evolution from the requirements of the e-business process evolution. The strategy includes a toolkit composed of a set of decision tables and a measurement framework, both referring to the organization, business processes, and legacy software systems. The decision tables allow the identification of the processes to be evolved, the actions to be performed on them and their activities, and the strategies to be adopted for evolving the information systems. The measurement framework aims at achieving a greater understanding of the processes and related problems, taking into account organizational and technological issues.