Architecture driven modernization in practice

The European Space Agency (ESA) as many other companies is interested in capitalizing its business assets. With the space programmes often lasting 10 to 20 years, the software system migration problems arise frequently. The Object Management Group promotes the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) concept and proposes the Architecture Driven Modernization (ADM) approach for model-based platform migration. SOFTEAM, Fraunhofer FOKUS and GTI6 performed an ESA-funded study on Round Trip Engineering for Space Systems. During this study the state-of-the-art methods and tools for ADM and MDA were combined with state-of-the-art model based testing (MBT) approaches to safeguard the modernization process. Both techniques were assessed by applying them to a real-life use case the migration and testing of a distributed archive and versioning system. In this article we overview the combined platform migration and testing methodology used in the project and summarize our experience during its application to the ESAs File Archive System. We specially focus on real life experience with MBT and discuss lessons learned.