Interview: Overcoming Migration Challenges

Companies across the globe are continuing to allow legacy technology negatively impact their business because they either don’t know what to do or feel it is too risky or costly to modernise their applications. The reality is that there will come a point when they cannot ignore it anymore and they have to do something about their legacy systems.

Using the Legacy Bridge technology, one of our customers carried out a HOOD and Ada83 migration in to UML and Ada95 so that they could enhance existing their safety critical systems. We asked them about the migration and how they used technology to overcome their challenges they faced.  

What was the main reason for migration?

There were three main reasons:

1. To have a single toolset for both Software Analysis and Software Design work
2. To reduce the number of toolsets in use on the project (thus reducing maintenance renewal costs)
3. To move to a company preferred toolset
4. To increase integration with other company preferred toolsets (i.e. DOORS and Dimensions CM)

What were the alternatives to using Legacy Bridge?

The Rhapsody in Ada inbuilt reverse engineering tools or to develop our own in house migration tools however this was deemed early on to be too expensive.

What was the deciding factor to choose Objektum Solutions and Legacy Bridge to migrate?

Objektum Solutions had already been through similar exercises of migrating from CP-HOOD to UML albeit to a different UML toolset with another organisation similar to ours. Legacy Bridge has the facility to bring across our HOOD artefacts, as well as synchronising the design with the current code.

What time savings did Legacy Bridge bring?

Once it had been proven that Legacy Bridge could correctly analyse our HOOD and our Ada, the process of migration and synchronising with the code took only a couple of hours per model.

And, how was it working with the team at Objektum Solutions?

The support provided by Objektum was excellent, with most problems being resolved with days (if not hours) of being reported.  This enabled us to keep up the impetus of the migration process without have to wait too long for tool updates 
 

Another colleague also commented saying "The turnaround time for problem resolution was exceptional. This has been possible with the tremendous knowledge the team have of the product including HOOD, UML and Ada."

What benefits does migrating to UML give you for the future?

We now have both our software analysis and software implementation models in the same toolset; with both of these models integrated with our requirements database and our configuration management system.  All three toolsets are “current” toolsets widely used across the company and across industries.

Will code generation be a consideration going forward?

Code generation has to be ultimate aim; but for now we are happy that what is in Rhapsody can be shown (via the compare functionality) to be a reasonably accurate representation of the code.