Towards a Computer Assisted Approach for Migrating Legacy Systems to SOA

Legacy system migration to Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) has been identified as the right path to the modernization of enterprise solutions needing agility to respond to changes and high levels of interoperability. However, one of the main challenges of migrating to SOA is finding an appropriate balance between migration effort and the quality of resulting service interfaces. This paper describes an approach to assist software analysts in the definition of produced services, which bases on the fact that poorly designed service interfaces may be due to bad design and implementation decisions present in the legacy system. Besides automatically detecting common design pitfalls, the approach suggests refactorings to correct them. Resulting services have been compared with those that resulted from migrating a real system by following two classic approaches.