AWSM: Agile Web Migration for SMEs

Overall Objective

Migrating legacy desktop application to web applications is an important and challenging task for SME-sized independent software vendors (ISVs). Due to limited resources, lack of web engineering and migration expertise they find it hard to commence a web migration. Existing approaches exhibit several shortcomings which contribute to ISV's difficulties of commencing web migration. They fail to address doubts about feasibility and desirability of web migration with appropriate means of managing the risk of loss of valuable knowledge embedded in the legacy source code through migration and through demonstration of plausibility and benefits of a web-based version of the legacy system. They fail to address concerns about the impact on customers through visible changes in user interfaces. They fail to address feasibility of the web migration in terms of limited resources, lack of web migration and target technology expertise and ongoing development and maintenance activities of ISVs. AWSM addresses these shortcomings by providing a methodology and platform that support integrated knowledge recovery, rapid creation of demonstrative web migration prototypes, computation of UI similarity and that consistently takes ISV characteristics into account as non-functional requirement for all proposed techniques.

Research Contritubtions

AWSM provides three major research contributions:

Transfer of the Crowdsourcing paradigm to the Reverse Engineering domain creating a novel Crowdsourced Reverse Engineering (CSRE) strategy
Transfer of the Rapid Prototyping paradigm to the Web Migration domain creating a novel Rapid Web Migration Prototyping (ReWaMP) strategy
Specificaion of a computable UI Similarity Measurement based on a computer-vision approach