692 research outputs found
Extraction of objects from legacy systems: an example using cobol legacy systems
In the last few years the interest in legacy information system has increased because of the escalating resources spent on their maintenance. On the other hand, the importance of extracting knowledge from business rules is becoming a crucial issue for modern business: sometime, because of inappropriate documentation, this knowledge is essentially only stored in the code. A way to improve their use and maintainability in the present environment is to migrate them into a new hardware / software platform reusing as much of their experience as possible during this process. This migration process promotes the population of a repository of reusable software components for their reuse in the development of a new system in that application domain or in the later maintenance processes. The actual trend in the migration of a legacy information system, is to exploit the potentialities of object oriented technology as a natural extension of earlier structured programming techniques. This is done by decomposing the program into several agent-like modules communicating via message passing, and providing to this system some object oriented key features. The key step is the "object isolation", i.e. the isolation of .groups of routines and related data items : to candidates in order to implement an abstraction in the application domain. The main idea of the object isolation method presented here is to extract information from the data flow, to cluster all the procedures on the base of their data accesses. It will examine "how" a procedure accesses the data in order to distinguish several types of accesses and to permit a better understanding of the functionality of the candidate objects. These candidate modules support the population of a repository of reusable software components that might be used as a basis of the process of evolution leading to a new object oriented system reusing the extracted objects
C to O-O Translation: Beyond the Easy Stuff
Can we reuse some of the huge code-base developed in C to take advantage of
modern programming language features such as type safety, object-orientation,
and contracts? This paper presents a source-to-source translation of C code
into Eiffel, a modern object-oriented programming language, and the supporting
tool C2Eif. The translation is completely automatic and supports the entire C
language (ANSI, as well as many GNU C Compiler extensions, through CIL) as used
in practice, including its usage of native system libraries and inlined
assembly code. Our experiments show that C2Eif can handle C applications and
libraries of significant size (such as vim and libgsl), as well as challenging
benchmarks such as the GCC torture tests. The produced Eiffel code is
functionally equivalent to the original C code, and takes advantage of some of
Eiffel's object-oriented features to produce safe and easy-to-debug
translations
A method for re-modularising legacy code
This thesis proposes a method for the re-modularisation of legacy COBOL. Legacy code often performs a number of functions that if split, would improve software maintainability. For instance, program comprehension would benefit from a reduction in the size of the code modules. The method aims to identify potential reuse candidates from the functions re-modularised, and to ensure clear interfaces are present between the new modules. Furthermore, functionality is often replicated across applications and so the re-modularisation process can also seek to reduce commonality and hence the overall amount of a company's code requiring maintenance. A 10 step method is devised which assembles a number of new and existing techniques into an approach suitable for use by staff not having significant reengineering experience. Three main approaches are used throughout the method; that is the analysis of the PERFORM structure, the analysis of the data, and the use of graphical representations. Both top-down and bottom-up strategies to program comprehension are incorporated within the method as are automatable, and user controlled processes to reuse candidate selection. Three industrial case studies are used to demonstrate and evaluate the method. The case studies range in size to gain an indication of the scalability of the method. The case studies are used to evaluate the method on a step by step basis; both strong points and deficiencies are identified, as well as potential solutions to the deficiencies. A review is also presented to assesses the three main approaches of the methods; the analysis of the PERFORM and data structures, and the use of graphical representations. The review uses the process of software evolution for its evaluation using successive versions of COBOL software. The method is retrospectively applied to the earliest version and the known changes identified from the following versions are used to evaluate the re-modularisations. Within the evaluation chapters a new link within the dominance tree is proposed as is an approach for dealing with multiple dominance trees. The results show that «ach approach provides an important contribution to the method as well as giving a useful insight (in the form of graphical representations) of the process of software evolution
COBOL systems migration to SOA: Assessing antipatterns and complexity
SOA and Web Services allow users to easily expose business functions to build larger distributed systems. However, legacy systems - mostly in COBOL - are left aside unless applying a migration approach. The main approaches are direct and indirect migration. The former implies wrapping COBOL programs with a thin layer of a Web Service oriented language/platform. The latter needs reengineering COBOL functions to a modern language/ platform. In our previous work, we presented an intermediate approach based on direct migration where developed Web Services are later refactored to improve the quality of their interfaces. Refactorings mainly capture good practices inherent to indirect migration. For this, antipatterns for WSDL documents (common bad practices) are detected to prevent issues related to WSDLs understanding and discoverability. In this paper, we assess antipatterns of Web Services’ WSDL documents generated upon the three migration approaches. In addition, generated Web Services’ interfaces are measured in complexity to attend both comprehension and interoperability. We apply a metric suite (by Baski & Misra) to measure complexity on services interfaces - i.e., WSDL documents. Migrations of two real COBOL systems upon the three approaches were assessed on antipatterns evidences and the complexity level of the generated SOA frontiers - a total of 431 WSDL documents.Fil: Mateos Diaz, Cristian Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientÃficas y Técnicas. Centro CientÃfico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de IngenierÃa del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de IngenierÃa del Software; ArgentinaFil: Zunino Suarez, Alejandro Octavio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientÃficas y Técnicas. Centro CientÃfico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de IngenierÃa del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de IngenierÃa del Software; ArgentinaFil: Flores, Andrés Pablo. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Facultad de Informática. Departamento IngenierÃa de Sistemas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientÃficas y Técnicas. Centro CientÃfico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte; ArgentinaFil: Misra, Sanjay. Atilim University; TurquÃa. Covenant University; Nigeri
Evolving software reengineering technology for the emerging innovative-competitive era
This paper reports on a multi-tool commercial/military environment combining software Domain Analysis techniques with Reusable Software and Reengineering of Legacy Software. It is based on the development of a military version for the Department of Defense (DOD). The integrated tools in the military version are: Software Specification Assistant (SSA) and Software Reengineering Environment (SRE), developed by Computer Command and Control Company (CCCC) for Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) and Joint Logistics Commanders (JLC), and the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) STARS Software Engineering Environment (SEE) developed by Boeing for NAVAIR PMA 205. The paper describes transitioning these integrated tools to commercial use. There is a critical need for the transition for the following reasons: First, to date, 70 percent of programmers' time is applied to software maintenance. The work of these users has not been facilitated by existing tools. The addition of Software Reengineering will also facilitate software maintenance and upgrading. In fact, the integrated tools will support the entire software life cycle. Second, the integrated tools are essential to Business Process Reengineering, which seeks radical process innovations to achieve breakthrough results. Done well, process reengineering delivers extraordinary gains in process speed, productivity and profitability. Most importantly, it discovers new opportunities for products and services in collaboration with other organizations. Legacy computer software must be changed rapidly to support innovative business processes. The integrated tools will provide commercial organizations important competitive advantages. This, in turn, will increase employment by creating new business opportunities. Third, the integrated system will produce much higher quality software than use of the tools separately. The reason for this is that producing or upgrading software requires keen understanding of extremely complex applications which is facilitated by the integrated tools. The radical savings in the time and cost associated with software, due to use of CASE tools that support combined Reuse of Software and Reengineering of Legacy Code, will add an important impetus to improving the automation of enterprises. This will be reflected in continuing operations, as well as in innovating new business processes. The proposed multi-tool software development is based on state of the art technology, which will be further advanced through the use of open systems for adding new tools and experience in their use
COBOL to Java and Newspapers Still Get Delivered
This paper is an experience report on migrating an American newspaper
company's business-critical IBM mainframe application to Linux servers by
automatically translating the application's source code from COBOL to Java and
converting the mainframe data store from VSAM KSDS files to an Oracle
relational database. The mainframe application had supported daily home
delivery of the newspaper since 1979. It was in need of modernization in order
to increase interoperability and enable future convergence with newer
enterprise systems as well as to reduce operating costs. Testing the modernized
application proved to be the most vexing area of work. This paper explains the
process that was employed to test functional equivalence between the legacy and
modernized applications, the main testing challenges, and lessons learned after
having operated and maintained the modernized application in production over
the last eight months. The goal of delivering a functionally equivalent system
was achieved, but problems remained to be solved related to new feature
development, business domain knowledge transfer, and recruiting new software
engineers to work on the modernized application.Comment: 4 pages, Accepted to be Published in: Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE
International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME),
September 23-29, 2018, Madrid, Spai
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