The SAPIENSA approach for service-enabling pre-existing legacy assets

Abstract. Migration of legacy assets to SOA embodies a key software engineering challenge. Existing methodologies mostly focus on develop-ment of new services while they provide little to no guidance for trans-forming services from pre-existing enterprise assets. SAPIENSA, a joint research project of the VU University Amsterdam and Tilburg Univer-sity, aims to fill this gap. It proposes a migration methodology creating a well-constructed SOA out of pre-existing enterprise assets. The method-ology exploits the relevant architectural knowledge to drive migration. To this end, the necessary knowledge concerning the migration should be identified, captured, analyzed and generalized. It should be noted that, the methodology is the result of an extensive analysis of the literature in the fields of reengineering and service engineering. This paper provides an overview of the SAPIENSA methodology along with discussions on the regarding research areas.