An assessment strategy for identifying legacy system evolution requirements in eBusiness context

The enactment of eBusiness processes requires the effective usage of the existing legacy applications inthe eBusiness initiatives. Technical issues are not enough to drive the evolution of the existing legacyapplications, but problems concerning the perspectives, strategies, and business of the enterprises haveto be considered. In particular, there is a strict relationship between the evolution of the legacy systems andthe evolution of the eBusiness processes.This paper proposes a strategy to extract the requirements for a legacy system evolution from therequirements of the eBusiness evolution. The proposed strategy aims at characterizing the software systemwithin the whole environment in which its evolution will be performed. It provides a useful set of attributesaddressing technical, process, and organizational issues.Moreover, a set of assessment activities is proposedaffecting the order in which the attributes are assessed.