2026 Theses Doctoral

Automating the Modernization of Legacy Software Applications

Nitin, Vikram

The task of modernizing legacy software has gained increasing attention in recent years. Old code is prone to security vulnerabilities, and is difficult to maintain and upgrade. Manual approaches to modernize legacy software involve intensive human effort and are challenging to scale up. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop automated techniques to modernize old code. In this proposal, we shall look at three aspects of this problem.

The first is the translation of code written in older programming languages like C, to code written in modern programming languages like Rust. The second is the conversion of legacy monolithic software architectures to modern microservice architectures. The third is the detection of bugs that arise during modernization. We propose a system design to automate the modernization of legacy code, that tackles these three specific aspects. We conclude with a discussion of the current state of the field, and reflect on directions for future work.