Migrating Legacy Software to New Technologies

Although legacy software certainly represents worthy assets for enterprises, it doesn’t fully benefit from the powerful concepts enabled by the evolution of hardware and software technologies. The prevalent view is that in order to invigorate the legacy with the new concepts it suffices to bury (wrap) it with layers upon layers of middleware. Although commercially valid, this approach sometimes will produce poor mock ups of the intended concepts so limiting the total exploitation and faster adoption of technology. But this long-term unsound remedy is not the only ‘solution’; latest results in software migration and transformation automation can be a more comprehensive solution for benefiting the legacy functionality with the advances in technology.

During this talk, we are going to present technology and processes that can be used to cope with the migration as well as the re-architecture of legacy code in a cost efficient way. We will present the underlying concepts around the technology, how it is applicable to several languages, and examples about the discovery and separation of functionality aiming at multi-layers and componentized architectures. We intend to raise some questions on the relationships between code separation for multi-layer architecture and separation for multi-threading purposes that might be convenient for multi-core processors.

Presenter(s)

ArtinSoft S.A. is a company devoted to the research, development, and commercialization of software migration technology for 14 years. The company has developed Microsoft's upgrade and conversion assistants, as well as several other migration products. Carlos Araya is the CEO and founder of ArtinSoft and got his PhD for work on artificial intelligence and deduction languages from the University of Kansas in 1991.