As an innovative software application mode,Software as a service(SaaS) shows many attractive advantages.Migrating legacy system to SaaS can make outdated systems revived.In the process of migration,the existing valuable components need to be discovered and reused in order that the target system could be developed/integrated more efficiently.An innovative approach is proposed in this paper to extract the reusable components from legacy systems.Firstly,implementation models of legacy system are recovered through reverse engineering.Secondly,function models are derived by vertical clustering,and then logical components are discovered by horizontal clustering based on the function models.Finally,the reusable components with specific feature descriptions are extracted.Through experimental verification,the approach is considered to be efficient in reusable component discovery and to be helpful to migrating legacy system to SaaS.
Legacy system migration to the cloud brings both great challenges and benefits, so there exist various academic research and industrial applications on legacy system migration to the cloud. By analyzing the research achievements and application status,we divide the existing migration methods into three strategies according to the cloud service models integrally. Different processes need to be considered for different migration strategies, and different tasks will be involved accordingly. The similarities and differences between the migration strategies are discussed, and the challenges and future work about legacy system migration to the cloud are proposed. The aim of this paper is to provide an overall presentation for legacy system migration to the cloud and identify important challenges and future research directions.