Model-driven engineering for software migration in a large industrial context

As development techniques, paradigms and platforms evolve far more quickly than domain applications, software modernization and migration, is a constant challenge to software engineers. For more than ten years now, the Sodifrance company has been intensively using Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) for both development and migration projects. In this paper we report on the use of MDE as an efficient, flexible and reliable approach for a migration process (reverse-engineering, transformation and code generation). Moreover, we discuss how MDE is economically profitable and is cost-effective over the migration through out-sourced manual re-development. The paper is illustrated with the migration of a large-scale banking system from Mainframe to J2EE.