Identifying Success Factors in a Legacy Systems Reengineering Project Using Agile Methods

Abstract

System maintenance or extension costs, during its lifecycle, can exceed the cost of its rewriting and can lead companies to choose a reengineering strategy. On the other hand, several similarities between recommended practices for reengineering projects and agile practices can be found in the literature. Hence, this article aims to understand the success factors that influence the reengineering process of legacy systems and how agile methods can influence the results. A real project of a software development company in the city of Sao Paulo was used as basis for a case study of a legacy system reengineering to a SOA application. The project results were compared with the perception of the development team through semi-structured interviews, the analysis of project artifacts and the best practices proposed in the literature to understand whether the results mentioned in the literature would be confirmed in practice. The obtained results reinforce the hypothesis that reengineering projects can be more successful when developed using agile methodologies.