The modernization of legacy systems has gained more interest in the University of Brasília (UnB), mainly due to the lack of integration between applications, duplicity of the implementation of many business components, and the challenges related to maintenance tasks. From the point of view of organizations, legacy systems correspond to applications that support the business operation of an institution and consolidate most of the corporate information.
Thus, it is imperative that, during an effort of software modernization, new systems should be integrated to the existing ones to share their business workflows. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach emerges as a way to solve this problem, providing a high- level abstraction between applications and the business layer.
In this context, this work describes a service-oriented approach that consists of a modernization process and a REST based software infrastructure for the development of services. This approach aims to integrate some of the business rules of the legacy systems used in the University, and to improve the maintainability of such systems through an architecture that allows the systematic modernization of legacy systems. As contributions of this work, we conducted a research in the literature through a Systematic Mapping Study related to the modernization of legacy systems, in order to characterize the modernization in the context of software maintenance and describe the current scenario of modernization of the systems at UnB.
In addition, we propose an modernization approach that consists of a process for modernizing legacy systems and a software architecture to support such an approach. We also empirically evaluated the proposed approach using the Action Research methodology, in order to modernize the Academic Assistance System of UnB and verify the impact of adopting the approach in the context of software maintenance in a real modernization scenario.