White-box modernization of legacy applications: The oracle forms case study

Software modernization consists of transforming legacy applications into modern technologies, mainly to minimize maintenance costs. This transformation often produces a new application that is a poor copy of the legacy due to the degradation of quality attributes, for example. This paper presents a white-box transformation approach that changes the application architecture and the technological stack without losing business value and quality attributes. This approach obtains a technology agnostic model from the original sources, such a model facilitates the architecture configuration before performing the actual transformation of the application into the new technology. The architecture for the new application can be configured considering aspects such as data access, quality attributes, and process. We evaluate our approach through an industrial case study, the gist of which is the transformation of Oracle Forms applications-where the presentation layer is highly coupled to the data access layer-to multitiered applications.