Interactive, Iterative, Tooled, Rule-Based Migration of Microsoft Access to Web Technologies

Abstract: In the context of a collaboration with Berger-Levrault, an IT company producing information systems, we are working on migrating Microsoft Access monolithic applications to the web front-end and microservices back-end. Like in most software migrations, developers must learn the target technology, and they will be in charge of the evolution of the migrated system in the future. To respond to this problem, we propose the developers take over the migration project. To enable the developers to drive the migration to the target systems, we propose an Interactive, Iterative, Tooled, Rule-Based Migration approach. The contributions of this article are (i) an iterative, interactive process to language, library, GUI and architectural migration; (ii) proposal of a set of artefacts required to support such an approach; (iii) three different validations of the approach: (a) library and paradigm usage migration to Java and Pharo, (b) tables and queries migration to Java and Typescript, (c) form migration to Java Springboot and Typescript Angular.