Mainframe Migration based on Screen Scraping

Companies possess a history and large array of legacy information systems that consume a great part of their IT budget in operations and maintenance. These systems are mission-critical, and they cannot be fully discarded since they retain business rules and provide information that is not available anywhere else. Unfortunately, decades-old legacy systems cannot easily withstand modification. Mainframes specifically conglomerate most of these legacy systems. Although there are some white-box solutions for migrating mainframe systems, such solutions lack systematicity and do not provide mechanisms for verifying business rules preservation. Hence, this paper presents a black-box solution (ignoring the internal structure of COBOL programs) which uses a screen scraping technique for migrating mainframe systems toward JavaFX and relational databases. Together with this solution, this paper provides an automatic verification technique to check if the recreated system reflects all the embedded business logic. This proposal has been designed and developed in the context of an industrial project, in which the solution has already migrated 43,000,000 mainframe screens from four systems. The main implication for researchers and practitioners is that screen scraping has proved to be feasible for migrating mainframe systems in large-scale projects within a manageable time-frame while preserving business

Experiences from a Brazilian Bank Reengineering Project

<p>BRITO, Kellyton Santos ; GARCIA, Vinicius Cardoso ; MEIRA, Silvio Romero de Lemos . Experiences from a Brazilian Bank Reengineering Project. In: European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR), 2010, Madrid. Proceedings of the European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR), 2010.</p> <p>Abstract. The migration of legacy mainframe applications to new web technologies is a challenge faced by several organizations. Since 2005, the Pitang and C.E.S.A.R companies are involved in a large migration project for a bank institution, aiming to migrate NATURAL/ADABAS legacy mainframe source code to a web-based platform. In this paper, we briefly describe the project’s evolution and lessons learned.</p