INVESTIGATION OF QUALITY AND FUNCTIONAL RISK ISSUES IN REENGINEERING PROCESS OF LEGACY SOFTWARE SYSTEM

The modern business environment requires organizations to be flexible and open to change if they are to gain and retain their competitive age. Competitive business environment needs to modernize existing legacy system in to self-adaptive ones. Reengineering presents an approach to transfer a legacy system towards an evolvable system. Software reengineering is a leading system evolution technique which helps in effective cost control, quality improvements and time and risk reduction. However successful improvement of legacy system through reengineering requires portfolio analysis of legacy application around various quality and functional parameters some of which includes reliability and modularity of the functions, level of usability and maintainability as well as policy and standards of software architecture and availability of required documents. Portfolio analysis around these parameters will help to examine the legacy application on quality and functional gaps within the application [1]. In this paper we identify and measure risk factors related to quality and functional aspect of legacy system. Paper analyzes a variety of risk components related to quality and functional dimensions of legacy application. Identification and development of various metrics and important measures to compute impact value of individual risk component is also addressed. Existing quality and functional level of legacy system are considered to identify and categories risk components. The impact of various technical issues such as inconsistency between architecture of legacy and target system, unmodularised legacy system architecture, unavailability of required design documents, high degree of coupling between modules of legacy system has been covered in the paper.