TI A Framework for Immigrating Existing Software into New
Software Development Environements 

LT CUCS-027-90 

OR COLUM 

YR 1990 

AU Michael H. Sokolsky 

AU Gail E. Kaiser 

AV ftp cs.columbia.edu:pubreportsreports-1990cucs-027-90.ps.Z 

AB We have investigated the problem of immigrating software
artifacts from one software development environment (SDE) to
another for the purpose of upgrading to new SDEs as technology
improves, while continuing development or maintenance of existing
software systems.  We first taxonomize the larger problem of data
migration, to establish the scope of immigration.  We then
classify SDEs in terms of the ease of immigrating software
artifacts out of the data repository of the source SDE without
knowledge of its internal representation.  A framework is
presented for constructing automatic immigration tools as
utilities provided by destination SDEs. We describe a specific
immigration tool, called Marvelizer, that we have implemented as
part of the Marvel SDE and discuss our experience using the tool.