Evolution of existing software to mobile computing platforms: Framework support and case study

Abstract

Mobile computing as ubiquitous and pervasive technology supports portable and context-aware computation. To date, there exist a significant number of traditional computing systems–running on the web and/or workstation-based platforms–that lack features of mobile computing, including but not limited to ubiquity, context-sensing, and high interactivity. Software that executes on these traditional computing systems is referred to as legacy software that can be upgraded to exploit the features of mobile technologies. However, legacy software may contain critical data, logic, and processes that cannot be easily replaced. One of the solutions is to evolve legacy software systems by (a) upgrading their functionality while (b) preserving their data and logic. Recently research and development efforts are focused on modernizing the legacy systems as per the needs of service and cloud-based platforms. However, there does not exist any research that supports a systematic modernization of legacy software as per the requirements of the mobile platforms. We propose a framework named Legacy-to-Mobile as a solution that supports an incremental and process-driven evolution of the legacy software to mobile computing software. The proposed Legacy-to-Mobile framework unifies the concepts of software reverse engineering (recovering software artifacts) and software change (upgrading software artifacts) to support the legacy evolution. The framework follows an incremental approach with four processes that include (i) evolution planning, (ii) architecture modeling, (iii) architecture change, and (iv) software validation of mobile computing software. The framework provides the foundation (as part of futuristic research) to develop a tool prototype that supports automation and user decision support for incremental and process-driven evolution of legacy software to mobile computing platforms.