Feasibility evaluation of the legacy software system migration

With the development of the software technologies more and more of the currently used software systems become obsolete. Organisations struggle with these kinds of legacy software systems, because they eventually become a burden for the organisation’s business. One solution is to migrate the legacy software system to the newer software architecture technologies or migrate to a completely new software system. There are however challenges that can prevent the legacy software system migration. The analysis on the migration’s feasibility is the first phase of the migration process, and it should not be ignored. The migration decision should be evaluated thoroughly before proceeding with the migration process. The purpose of this thesis is to help the organisations with the decision making process of the legacy software system migration. To meet this goal the thesis researches the methods to evaluate the migration’s feasibility, factors that affect the migration decision, and the challenges related to the legacy software system migration. The existing literature is researched by applying a systematized literature review. The literature review showed that the migration’s feasibility evaluation is still a quite new research subject, and most of the literature focuses on the evaluation of the migration costs. In the literature the cost is identified as a factor that has the biggest impact into the migration decision. However, there are also other important factors that need to be taken into account in the migration decision. As part of the thesis an empirical case study was performed where the feasibility of the migration from old reporting and analysing tools to a newer web-based application was evaluated. The evaluation was based on the information provided by the existing literature, and it was executed from technical, organisational, and economic point of views. The feasibility evaluation tests provided insight of the characteristics and functionalities of the new software application as well as risks and benefits related to the migration process. The results of the technical feasibility tests proved that the application was not yet ready to provide the similar reporting and analysing possibilities as the old reporting and analysing tools. However the results of the feasibility tests also recommended not to dismiss the migration completely and rather postpone it. Thesis also provided future research subjects for the case organisation on their new software application, and laid groundwork for the feasibility evaluation of the legacy software system migration that could be used in further research on cloud migration