In this parallel session, ‘Digital transition: continuous evolution’, Paul Hilkens of Canon Production Printing, Niels Brouwers of Capgemini Nederland and Daan van der Munnik and Tim van der Horst, both of Philips, explained that software maintenance doesn’t have to be a chore; it can be an ongoing adventure. With examples from how the three companies have professionalised their maintenance, their presentations underlined the role of legacy systems in innovation and urged attendees to hone their expertise, craft new methodologies and wield cutting-edge tools to unleash the full potential of such systems.

Most high-tech systems have long lifecycles and these systems and their software get bigger, more functional and more complex over time. To keep these systems working and relevant, it is necessary to adapt and maintain their software. This software often contains tens of thousands of man-years of engineering work and innovation.

Rebuilding such systems from scratch is ever more unlikely as it would require years of high-risk development while stalling commercial development and eating away at a vast amount of company budget and scarce domain experts. Consequently, all new functionality, complexity and technology that the digital transformation will bring us has to be introduced while evolving the existing system.
The inevitable degradation of a developing software-intensive system over time, the aging of technology and the competition from products with less legacy therefore force companies to actively maintain and upgrade their architectures, fighting the technical debt.
Lifetime extension and rejuvenation are thus important elements of the strategy of our partner companies. This means that a suitable set of methods and technologies to support this process - if necessary, with specialized partners - needs to be developed and deployed.

Software maintenance and the development of legacy systems should be regarded as a profession within development instead of an undesired nuisance. As ESI has a long history in the topic, this seems to warrant a track in the symposium.

Forever young

This presentation will give an overview of how we, at Philips Image Guided Therapy Systems, keep our valuable software heritage young, by leveraging the TNO/ESI Renaissance tool suite.

We will give a brief overview of the tool suite and explore the areas where it is applied successfully at Philips by diving deeper into two real life examples.

How to unleash automation to rejuvenate software

As an implementation partner of ESI, Capgemini is at the forefront of innovation. Leveraging the ESI-developed Renaissance methodology and tool, Reborn is our solution for industrializing, scaling and deploying automated software evolution.
Say goodbye to outdated software code: effortlessly integrate Reborn into your CI environment. Experience a paradigm shift where software understanding, analysis, and code refactoring become seamlessly possible with the lowest effort.
In this presentation you will learn how Reborn enables your teams to evolve their software to the latest software architectures, quality standards and software technologies, while staying focused on their core business.

• P1 Digital transformation, the road ahead

• P3 Digital engineering in brown field

• P4 Increasing R&D productivity

• Keynotes