Althani, B.F. (2019) A quality assured framework for the migration and modernisation of legacy systems. (PhD thesis), Kingston University, .
Abstract
The evolving technology landscape and dynamic business environment has placed significant pressure on organisations to transform and adapt their systems to address market demand and remain competitive. New computing paradigms and methodologies provide myriad opportunities to develop highly agile, flexible and responsive business processes that are necessary to compete in a competitive market place. Legacy systems frequently assume an embedded and critical role within organisations. However, the high cost of maintenance and use, incompatibility and scalability issues impose significant limitations to address modern business needs. The high risk and failure rate of migration projects emphasises the significance of effective migration strategies. This study investigated the development and evaluation of a new, generic and adoptable framework for system migration with software quality assurance which address the problems of existing approaches. The process drew on theoretical principles and models of software migration and real-context cases to produce the System Migration Life Cycle (SMLC), a novel framework that addresses many of migration issues and incorporates business and technical perspectives and quality criteria that specify quality factors and indicators with the aim of developing and entirely testable solution. The framework prescribes a step-by-step migration composed of three key stages of pre-migration, migration and post-migration each divided into phases comprised of tasks and subtasks. The SMLC framework further represents a novel contribution that addresses the need for a generic and adoptable quality-driven framework that provides holistic assessment of the software migration factors that can be applied to numerous contexts and applications. By drawing on AHP and ADEQUATE models the framework contributes combined quantitative and qualitative multi-evaluation criteria that provides a robust and accurate analysis and supports decision-making in uncertain situations. the SMLC framework was applied and evaluated in a web application case study. An impact assessment utilising pre-migration and post-migration evaluation showed a significant improvement in four of the five quality: Usability, Availability, Performance and Scalability. The findings from this research offer a valuable theoretical and managerial contribution to software migration knowledge and practice in integrating quality perspectives into existing approaches. Quality analysis represents a major contribution of this model that defines a broad range of quality factors.
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