Flykten från COBOL

Sammanfattning: This study discusses how migrating a legacy system to an object-oriented language works, and what kind of effect it generates. There are various methods that an organization can use when they want to migrate their legacy systems. The three most common procedures we found are reengineering, wrapping and redevelopment. The study will focus on how migration can be done and what the impact might be. Our case study has involved studying a public authority which has mainly used redevelopment when implementing the migration, but they have also used both reengineering and wrapping on certain occasions. In summary, there are many problems that can occur when the system is to be moved away from COBOL to other languages and we will mainly focus on the decisions underlying its implementation, the different ways they can be carried through, and how the problems that can arise are handled during migration. The study showed that the aspects that had a major impact on the choice of method the time and funding. The authorities’ reason for the migration was to have better flexibility and availability which they have succeeded and is now, for example, available around the clock. The redevelopment that the authority has used in our case study does not show that migration makes maintenance costs decrease; rather increase because it added more features and the systems became more complex which resulted in higher expenses. The authorities’ migration project has had big delays and that is a trademark problem with redevelopment. One reason for this is because they are migrating the systems iteratively and migrates parts of systems when there is time and funding. This resulted in a big delay but they have also never failed a project in the aspect that they had to go back to COBOL or abort it. The study thereby shows that a project which uses iterative redevelopment will not work ideally if the work is time- or budget sensitive but the results will be beneficial and will increase mainly functionality and flexibility.