Challenges for migrating to the service cloud paradigm: An agile perspective

Abstract

Migrating to the Service Cloud Paradigm implies the migration of legacy software systems to a service-oriented architecture with deployment in the cloud. Although this specific software modernization paradigm promises numerous strategic and operational advantages, it poses also many complex organizational and technical challenges, among which is the lack of mature processes, methods and techniques. This paper examines the questions of whether agile methods and techniques could be scaled to fit the migration to the Service Cloud Paradigm and how they could help overcoming the challenges of software modernization in this specific context. The research methodology presented here first extracts the challenges of the migration to Service Cloud Paradigm through a systematic literature review and then, using expert judgment, evaluates how different agile techniques, taken from Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP), could address the identified challenges. As a result, a ranked list of applicable agile techniques is presented and suggestions for their adoption in software modernization projects are drawn. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.