Migrating a large scale legacy application to SOA: Challenges and lessons learned

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a case study of a large scale legacy to service-oriented architecture migration process in the payments domain of a Dutch bank. The paper presents the business drivers that initiated the migration, and describes a 4-phase migration process. For each phase, the paper details benefits of using the techniques, best practices that contribute to the success, and possible challenges that are faced during migration. Based on these observations, the findings are discussed as lessons learned, including the implications of using reverse engineering techniques to facilitate the migration process, adopting a pragmatic migration realization approach, emphasizing the organizational and business perspectives, and harvesting knowledge of the system throughout the system's life cycle.