Software Engineering Institute

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become an increasingly popular mechanism for achieving interoperability between systems. Because it has characteristics of loose coupling, published interfaces, and a standard communication model, SOA enables existing legacy systems to expose their functionality as services, presumably without making significant changes to the legacy systems. Migration of legacy systems to service-oriented environments has been achieved within a number of domains—including banking, electronic payment, and development tools—showing that the promise is beginning to be fulfilled. 

While migration can have significant value, any specific migration requires a concrete analysis of the feasibility, risk, and cost involved. This technical note describes a new release of the Service Migration and Reuse Technique (SMART), which was initially developed in 2005. The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) SMART process helps organizations to make initial decisions about the feasibility of reusing legacy components as services within an SOA environment. SMART considers the specific interactions that will be required by the target SOA environment and any changes that must be made to the legacy components. To achieve this, SMART gathers information about legacy components, the target SOA environment, and candidate services to produce (1) a preliminary analysis of the viability of migrating legacy components to services, (2) an analysis of the migration strategies available, and (3) preliminary estimates of the costs and risks involved in the migration.