Software Migration Projects in Italian Industry: Preliminary Results from a State of the Practice Survey

Software migration is a fundamental and complex task in software maintenance, particularly relevant in recent years given the pervasiveness of Web and of mobile technologies. In the context of an Italian Research Project devoted to the empirical assessment of migration techniques and tools, this paper reports on a survey, performed among 59 Italian Information Technology (IT) companies, with the aim of investigating about their experiences in software migration, their main migration goals, and the pieces of technology adopted. The research project and the survey focused, in particular, on in-house migration projects towards the Web, service oriented architectures and wireless environments. A preliminary analysis of results confirmed that software migration is a very relevant phenomenon. Most migration activities performed in recent years targeted the Web, with a few number of migrations towards mobile and towards service-oriented architectures. Among other things, the survey highlights a limited, and insufficient, usage and availability of tools for supporting migration tasks.