Effort distribution for the Small System Migration Framework

Sammanfattning: Performing a migration of a legacy system can often be a daunting task. However, there often comes a time where maintaining a legacy system is not profitable. At such a time, estimating how much effort is required to perform a migration can be vital for the legacy system holders. There is a lack of research that shows the effort distribution for migrations of small legacy systems.The contribution of this thesis is an effort distribution for a framework for migrations called Small System Migration Framework (SSMF) and SSMF. The purpose of the thesis is to evaluate how the effort is distributed over different activities when migrating a small legacy system. The goal of the thesis is to help provide a basis for the estimation process during migrations. This was done by documenting how effort is distributed over different activities contained in SSMF.This thesis takes an abductive approach, combining an inductive approach used in the creation of a framework and a deductive approach to document how effort was distributed during the migration. A framework was created using the literature study and this framework was used to conduct a migration.The result of this thesis was an updated framework and a table presenting the effort distribution of the migration. The framework showed factors that were influential when migrating the system. The effort distribution presents how effort is distributed over activities and shows which activities during the migration required more effort.Finally the thesis concludes that effort is highly centered around the preparation phase of the migration. Understanding legacy systems can be a challenge, lacking documentation and issues brought by the lack of maintenance results in high effort during this phase. Allocating more resources for the preparation phase and having access to people with experience during the preparation phase would likely make for a smoother transition with less unidentified problems appearing.