This was the first day of OMG's technical meeting, here at Costa Rica.
I attended the Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) – Case Studies Information Day hosted by William Ulrich and Philip Newcomb.

First of all, William did a great introduction to ADM, that I can summarize as a process to update software system solutions (legacy ones) to newer (modern) languages and architectural best practices.

Now, the actual focus was about synching the business architecture to the IT (technical) architecture. This idea I had talked about in several other places: there is a trend to create IT solutions that require the business architecture to be adjusted to the IT decisions, and not all the way around. And they seem to move independently.

The presentation was good, but, based on the cases that were presented, the whole ideal was not actually implemented as it was described (maybe I missed something). Two cases were about translating the solution from ancient languages to new ones (Modernization of the EuroCAT Air Traffic Management System (EATMS) and Model-driven Reverse Engineering of Cobol-based applications). The other case was a different approach, using a SOA wrap of the legacy modules and building improvements upon it (SOA and BPM enabling an Agile Enterprise Architecture that, btw, didn't mention much of BPM).

So, my questions went around the ideal presentation of using architecture as a driven force to modernization, still the cases were more on language translation (so far no architecture look up). Also, the language translation was achieved using tools that were to automate the process. In this regard, I'm not sure about the capabilities of those tools to pass from a pure procedural language to an object oriented one (I know you can use Java for procedural programming, but to use it as OO requires modeling that cannot be automated). Still the answer Phil gave me was that I made an assertion, not a question, and that my assertion was wrong. I blame my english.

OMG has two standards, KDM (now an standard) and ASMT (in final stages). The first is to model knowledge, used to obtain a model of working solution. The other one is to model language, so I can pass from a written program into ASMT, do refactoring there (language agnostic) and then save using another language. That way I get language modernization (refactoring since there is no functional change). I think that is great.

Still, I was expecting more discussion about architectural visualization of legacy systems, architectural refactoring and evaluation of legacy solutions.

I will read a little bit more and write another post about that.

Will see tomorrow on the SOA and BPM day.\

William Martinez Pomares.