Challenges and success factors in the migration of legacy systems to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Abstract: Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a standards-based conceptual framework for flexible and adaptive systems and has become widely used in the recent years because of it. The number of legacy systems has already been migrated to this platform. As there are still many systems under consideration of such migration, we found it relevant to share the existing experience of SOA migration and highlight challenges that companies meet while adopting SOA. As not all of these migrations were successful, we also look into factors that have influence on the success of SOA projects. The research is based on two methods: a literature review and a survey. The results of the thesis include identification and quantitative analysis of the challenges and success factors of SOA projects. We also compare the survey results for different samples (based on the company industry, work area, size, and respondents experience with SOA and respondents job positions). In total, 13 SOA challenges and 18 SOA success factors were identified, analyzed and discussed in this thesis. Based on the survey results, there are three SOA challenges received the highest importance scores: “Communicating SOA Vision”, “Focus on business perspective, and not only IT perspective” and “SOA Governance”. The highest scored SOA success factor is “Business Process of Company”. While comparing different samples of the survey results, the most obvious differences are identified between the results received from people with development related job positions and people with business related job positions, and the results from companies of different sizes.