Approach to Dissertation

1
Approach to Dissertation
2
Timeframe When?

• Year 1
• Taught part Sept 1996 June 1997
• Project proposal June 1997
• Year 2
• Break
• Year 3
• June 1998 June 1999
• Research
• Write-up

3
What?

• Original idea
• How do you solve legacy systems?
• Criticism
• Too broad
• Changes
• Legacy business systems in the state sector in
  Ireland

4
How?

• What is a legacy system?
• What are the categories of causes?
• What are the categories of effects?
• How do causal categories relate to effect
  categories?
• Definition of legacy status
• Investigation into solution space
• Categories of solution components
• Problems mapping to solution components
• Study of suitability of SAP R/3 as a solution

5
What Is a Legacy System?

• Journal search
• Inspec search
• Collected ALL references relating to legacy
  systems
• Trawled for definitions
• With help of Dennis Kelly, differentiated between
  causes and effects.

6
What Are the Categories of Causes?

• Extracting from
• Repeated definitions in literature
• Personal experience
• Came up with
• 3 dimensions
• Legacy Causal Criteria Framework

7
What Are the Categories of Effects?

• Extracting from
• Repeated definitions in literature
• Abstract and generalise
• 4 categories
• Came up with
• Legacy Effect Determination Framework

8
How Do Causal Categories Relate to Effect
Categories?

• Major research into Causal criteria
• Worked backwards
• Best practices in the area
• What problems are these practices trying to
  solve?
• What are the problems?
• Also cross-referenced to previous research.
• Legacy Assessment through Cause and Effect
  (LACE) Framework

9
Definition of Legacy Status

• How legacy is a legacy system?
• Measurement of legacy status, rather than a
  yes/no answer to Is the system legacy?
• Brought together into a definition
• Advice of Dr. Bing Wu, supervisor.

10
Investigation Into Solution Space

• Looked up solutions
• MILLIONS of them!
• Tried to isolate components of solutions
• Less components than solutions

11
Categories of Solution Components

• Deal with them
• Gradually / big bang
• In-house / outsource
• Data/code reuse
• Reengineer the code
• Wrap application
• Iterative enhancement / software restructure /
  re-host
• Reengineer the business process

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13
Problems Mapping to Solution Components

• Not as well researched
• Referenced to best practices in first part of
  document
• Unproven

14
Study of suitability of SAP R/3 as a solution

• Given a generic application, how SAP R/3 matches

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Journal search

• MIS Quarterly
• Communications of the ACM
• Management Science
• IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
• Information and Management
• Journal of Management Information Systems
• Sloan Management Review
• Datamation
• Computer (IEEE)