Practice Of Insurance Legacy System Re-engineering Life/Asia Investment-linked Product System Re-engineering

With the rapid development of the insurance business in domestic market, it is now more and more difficult for informatization of core business to meet the practical demand of insurance. One possible answer to the problem is to introduce core business system of insurance from abroad, which enables us to learn from their advanced management experience. In regard to core business system of insurance, so far there is no local systemic, operable and detailed procedure for re-engineering projects, which helps to make full use of resources in the existing system, to support constant evolution of software. Meanwhile, insurance software could be faced with various problems after being used for a long time, such as poor performance, frequent changes in users. Therefore, renovation and upgrading of that is required.Based on re-engineering theory and industry characteristics of insurance, this article attempts to provide a practical procedure for re-engineering projects in legacy system of insurance. The procedure contains 9 phrases as"project estimation","system understanding","design capture","requirement capture","requirement","design","coding","test"and"deployment". The re-engineering project acquires understanding of the system hierarchythrough methods of reverse engineering such as code browsing, system trial, program slicing. With the help of documentations in software engineering and UML diagrams like case diagram, activity diagram, component diagram and program flow diagram, it then presents the understanding above and points out the critical and difficult parts of reversing project for core business system of insurance. The understanding of the system is the basis of the system following evolution at low cost. The engineering process offers as well phases of software engineering which are in common uses in core business system of insurance. Note that the article also provides the process of improvement and practical experience of incremental development techniques applied to large core business systems of insurance.The procedure is a great success in practical projects. It has been widely accepted by the whole project team, for being effective in reducing costs in communication, shortening the period of projects, ensuring the quality of the software system.