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

The enactment of eBusiness processes requires the effective usage of the existing legacy applications in the eBusiness initiatives. Technical issues are not enough to drive the evolution of the existing legacy applications, but problems concerning the perspectives, strategies, and business of the enterprises have to be considered. In particular, there is a strict relationship between the evolution of the legacy systems and the evolution of the eBusiness processes. This paper proposes a strategy to extract the requirements for a legacy system evolution from the requirements of the eBusiness evolution. The proposed strategy aims at characterizing the software system within the whole environment in which its evolution will be performed. It provides a useful set of attributes addressing technical, process, and organizational issues. Moreover, a set of assessment activities is proposed affecting the order in which the attributes are assessed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.