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Executive Summary

This practical guide details how the essential activities of application refactoring typically employed during modernization, monolith to microservices transformation, legacy & cloud migration etc. can be significantly accelerated by applying software intelligence.

Learn about:

  • The five approaches to application modernization & transformation
  • The most common Analysis and Action motions used during application refactoring
  • Accelerating the common refactoring motions by applying software intelligence

This guide is the result of distilling the experience of helping businesses, governments, consultancies, and integrators modernize complex, custom-built software applications.

Philippe GuerinCAST
Philippe Guerin

Senior Software Architect

Philippe Guerin is a Senior Software Architect at CAST and leads the team of CAST Solutions Architects. He is an expert in application modernization, architectural design, and software intelligence. Over the last 10 years Philippe has been helping businesses, government agencies, consultancies, integrators, and cloud vendors assess large IT organizations application landscapes and accelerate transformation efforts. You can contact him directly at p.guerin@castsoftware.com.

Accelerating Application Refactoring

This practical guide explains how application refactoring can be made faster, more predictable, and less risky by applying software intelligence and software mapping using CAST Imaging to reveal the real “as-is” architecture and its dependencies.

Learn the common refactoring approaches enterprises use (from “do nothing” through gradual replacement and continuous refinement) and why refactoring often devolves into costly trial-and-error when architecture knowledge is missing.

Break refactoring into seven repeatable motions (architecture review, target architecture planning, componentization, obsolescence/vulnerability identification, decoupling, component change, and framework insertion).

See how software mapping replaces manual code “archaeology”: architecture exploration that typically takes weeks can drop to hours by navigating a complete system blueprint and dependency map.

Plan the “to-be” architecture with explicit boundaries and monitor implementation compliance over time, including tracking connections targeted for elimination.

Identify candidates for microservices and component boundaries by analyzing interconnections and rapidly modeling alternative cut-lines with low risk of missing hidden dependencies.

Prioritize obsolete or vulnerable components by combining software composition analysis outputs with automated impact analysis, moving from weeks of manual triage to hours with higher certainty of prioritization.

De-risk decoupling by enumerating liaison points and impacts across layers; reduce wasted effort spent on dependency uncertainty and improve accuracy by 95%.

Accelerate component and framework changes by instantly visualizing upstream/downstream impacts (analysis reduced from weeks to hours/minutes) and tracking framework compliance over time.