Assessment of a renewal process experimented in the field

This work describes a case study which demonstrates the efficacy of a renew al process of a very old system, judged from the viewpoint of users and man agers. Data were collected over three years in a real environment to assess the effectiveness of the process, performed on a banking software system. The effects attributable to the progressive ageing of a system perceived by its users and managers were first individuated. After the process, such su ccesses as a drop in the costs of maintenance and an increase in transferab ility and testability of the programs were recorded. There were also some f ailures, notably insufficient improvement in the quality of the programs an d in their capacity to be modified. Finally, some conclusions are drawn as to the opportunity of subdividing the renewal process into two macrophases, reverse engineering and restoration, which integrate the process activitie s generating the benefits. Although these are conceptually distinguishable, they must be executed together to obtain the desired benefits from the ren ewal process. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserv ed.