Abstract
Nowadays, one of the IT challenges faced by many enterprises is the maintenance of their legacy system and migration of those systems to modern and flexible platform. In this paper, we study the network properties of software call graphs, and utilize the network theories to understand the business logic of legacy system. The call graphs turn out approximately scale-free and small world network properties. This finding provides new insight to understand the business logic of legacy system: the methods in a program can be naturedly partitioned into the business methods group and supportive methods group. Moreover, the result is also very helpful in reusing valuable functionality and identifying what services should be to expose in the migration from legacy to modern SOA context.
Highlights
In today’s Internet-driven economy, one of the IT challenges faced by many enterprises is the maintenance of their legacy system and migration of those systems to modern and flexible platform [1]
For call-graph is a directed graph, where an invocation relationship corresponds to a directed link pointing from the caller method to the callee method, in this empirical analysis, we explored the in-degree distribution and outdegree distribution respectively in order to give an exact analysis for the invocation relationship underlying software programs
From the empirical analysis 1, we have observed that the in-degree distribution and out-degree distribution of call graphs can be approximated by the power law, where the scaling exponent γ in in-degree distribution is 1.6 and the scaling exponent γ in out-degree distribution is 2.1 ± 0.1
Summary
In today’s Internet-driven economy, one of the IT challenges faced by many enterprises is the maintenance of their legacy system and migration of those systems to modern and flexible platform [1]. Different modules execute step-by-step invocation they can provide computing capability; while in network, different web pages can be dynamically linked together they can provide information service Both of them reflect the essential function by the runtime characteristics. The method init() has the out-degree above average, which performs the business function “initialization” to initialize the whole system; the methods initDB(), initCache() and buildConc() invoked by init() have high in-degree, which can provide some supportive functions, such as initializing database, clearing cache and building socket connection These key methods provide new insight to understand the business logic in legacy systems: the methods in a program can be naturedly partitioned into the business methods group and supportive methods group.
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