Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Due to the fact that the innovation rate is accelerating, software products in the
Internet era need also to constantly evolve. Take a look for instance the last five years
and how the way we work has changed thanks to the breakthrough of cloud
computing, smartphones or social networks. Innovations in the technological space
affect the systems that the software has to support or needs to adapt to. Innovations in
the business space also affect the licensing usage and delivery model. Software
products have to be improved with regard to these new circumstances but without
disrupting the business continuity of existing customers.
However, managing software modernization is still a significant challenge in
today's software life cycle. This challenge is usually considered as inevitable,
unpredictable, costly, technically difficult, time-and resource-consuming, and poorly
supported by tools and techniques or formalisms. The complete lifecycle of software,
from requirements to run-time and delivery has to be re-adapted to the new
technological and business conditions, requirements and challenges, since there is an
increasing need for tools/means to support software evolution and adaptation as a key
value for next generation service based software modernization.
The first challenge that all companies face is
the decision whether to migrate their
existing products or to start from scratch
. Current open [6] [7] [8] [9] and proprietary
migration methodologies [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] to service based software mostly begin
with a big bang approach or perform a feasibility analysis well advanced the migration
process. Questions such as cost and effort of the migration, impact of new business
models in the company or return of the investment need to be answered
before
tackling
the actual modernization. If the estimates they obtain suit their expectations and they
finally decide on the migration to a service-based software, reusing as much as possible
from the old one, they will face further challenges and difficulties, not only with respect
to the usage of new technologies, or architecture but also with respect to assumptions that
companies usually take for granted and then are no longer valid.
2
Approach
The main objective of the approach presented in this paper, currently being developed
and tested, is to provide a set of methods and techniques that will support companies
on the assessment for the modernization of their software towards a Cloud delivery
model, sustaining them on the migration strategy and providing the required tools to
analyse the impact of the potential transformation of the software in the company.
The modernization of the software and its delivery will be analyzed under two
different, but intertwined dimensions: one focusing on Technology (architecture,
performance, reliability, data schema, and so on) and another one on Organisational &
Business aspects (pricing model, market addressed, organisational processes, etc).
This is rather significant since the business model offered by the organization (based
on the delivery of software artefacts) will change from a product to a service. In the
cloud world, decisions taken at business level constraint the technology and vice
versa, for instance, a billing component (business related) needs a monitoring
component of application use (technology related).
After the assessment, the assessed organizations will be able to visualize a maturity
map where the position of their current business service is shown, as well as the
