Lay Down Complete Roadmap Before Legacy Application Migration

One of the most common problems faced by the companies is how to handle the legacy applications. These applications are often found to be working just perfectly in the environment they were designed for. However, they tend to fail to cater to the modern businesses requirements and environment.

The first logical step in the legacy applications migration process would be to judge the current status of the application and map the path to complete migration.

• Document: the starting point would be to understand the complete list of tasks the application performs, how the data is captured and how it is stored, the business requirements and the encapsulation of the business rules into the application and the automated process flows.
• Requirements: the business needs, the performance and the scalability should be collected along with the dependencies and the restrictions which create the list of the key functional requirements.
• Gaps: You now have the present application details and the target requirements so you need to point out the major improvements and introductions which are required during the migration.
• Architect: Prepare a detailed and complete roadmap of how the migration is to be performed.
• Modularise: Each module which are to be created should have a well-defined interface and a clearly defined business function. This helps in creating a services model which leads to quicker deployment of the enhanced application.
• Model: The models are created for easy interaction between the business process which drive and support the organisation and the application.
• Integrate: You can utilise ESB (Enterprise Resource Bus) architecture which helps us to integrate the newer modules into the existing legacy applications.
• Extend: The ESB interface helps with a framework to implement the needed service interface. This allows the data to be accessed easily and updated as need be, between the old and the modern environments.
• Test: As each of these models are integrated into the existing system one by one, they are tested against system test cycles as well as the business scenarios which need them.

Instead of waiting to change the existing system at one go and bring a new application, which would anyway be backdated before it is implements, thanks to the rapid pace of technology evolution, this method would bring down the operational cost and the project risks because it will continuously improve the functionalities of the existing system.