A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making for Legacy System Modernization With FUCOM-WSM Approach

Abstract

Modernizing legacy software has always been a core concern of businesses and industries that strive to improve their performance. However, decision makers fail to address each criterion’s concerns and provide precise solutions for how legacy software modernization can be implemented. This paper proposes a new Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) method for legacy software modernization. The aim of the proposed method is to rank different software modernization solutions based on the predetermined evaluation criteria. The evaluation criteria considered in this work include Motivating Factors and Challenges criteria that possibly affect legacy software modernization. The method introduced is a combination of the Full Consistency Method (FUCOM) and Weighted Sum Method (WSM), in which FUCOM is used to maintain the reliability of the decision model and WSM to calculate overall importance or weight of each criterion in the decision-making process. This MCDM method is formulated to obtain the most optimal solution that satisfies the evaluation criteria defined by industrial stakeholders based on the survey conducted. A case study on modernizing legacy billing software for a telecommunication company is used to further illustrate the implementation of the proposed methodology in different situations.

Keywords

• Legacy software modernization
• MCDM
• FUCOM
• WSM
• software engineering