Locating candidate web service in legacy software: A search based approach

Locating candidate web services in legacy software is the most challenging task in the process of migrating (i.e. reengineering) legacy software towards service oriented architectures and web services technologies. In this paper and for the first time, we formulate the problem of locating services as search problem and we justify the adoption of functional cohesion measures and GA (i.e. Genetic Algorithms) to find an approximate solution, a set of modules(i.e. procedures or functions) contributing in the computation of searched service, to this problem. This approach is experimented on a two medium-sized legacy software and shown that it outperforms features location approaches based on information retrieval tools when used to locate services in legacy software.