Legacy Evolution to SOA

The SOA Working Group contributes to the Open Group mission of Boundaryless Information Flow by developing and fostering common understanding of SOA.

Companies in all industries and of all sizes have expressed a growing need for migrating their existing application assets into new architectures guided by SOA concepts. The rationale is based on

• Financial considerations (protecting investments, leveraging existing assets);
• Employee skill ‚migrations’ (rather than replacing people);
• Stability (retaining operational software benefits); and
• Evolutionary renewal (enabling new and emerging technologies).

The Legacy Evolution to SOA project will contribute to the SOA Working Group objectives in the following specific ways:

• Provide an overview of Legacy Evolution approaches in the participating Member organizations;
• Define a taxonomy for Legacy Evolution;
• Define the outline of a Legacy Evolution method answering the most urgent industry needs, based on L2SOA and other methods available through the Members;
• Position Legacy Evolution within Enterprise Architecture and SOA Governance;
• Define organizational and tooling requirements for the refined method phases - these requirements will be stated in way similar to SOA Reference Architecture definitions;
• Define measurements and estimating models for Legacy Evolution; and
• Define skill maps and education roadmaps for Legacy Evolution practitioners.