Transitioning Applications to Semantic Web Services: An Automated Formal Approach

Semantic Web Services have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential, and attract significant attention from both industry and the research community. Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web Service technologies has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many systems have been developed without considering the potential of the web in integrating services and sharing resources. Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to Semantic Web Service-based systems can be a very tedious and expensive process, which carries a definite risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies which allow the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such a strategy. In this paper we propose a methodology for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services by taking the advantage of rigorous mathematical methods. Our methodology allows users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platform automatically or semi-automatically

Extracting Business Rules from COBOL: A Model-Based Framework

International audienceOrganizations rely on the logic embedded in their Information Systems for their daily operations. This logic implements the business rules in place in the organization, which must be continuously adapted in response to market changes. Unfortunately, this evolution implies understanding and evolving also the underlying software components enforcing those rules. This is challenging because, first, the code implementing the rules is scattered throughout the whole system and, second, most of the time documentation is poor and out-of-date. This is specially true for older systems that have been maintained and evolved for several years (even decades). In those systems, it is not even clear which business rules are enforced nor whether rules are still consistent with the current organizational policies. In this sense, the goal of this paper is to facilitate the comprehension of legacy systems (in particular COBOL-based ones) by providing a model driven reverse engineering framework able to extract and visualize the business logic embedded in them

Extracting Business Rules from COBOL: A Model-Based Tool

International audienceThis paper presents a Business Rule Extraction tool for COBOL systems. Starting from a COBOL program, we derive a model-based representation of the source code and we provide a set of model transformations to identify and visualize the embedded business rules. In particular, the tool facilitates the definition of an application vocabulary and the identification of relevant business variables. In addition, such variables are used as starting point to slice the code in order to identify business rules, that are finally represented by means of textual and graphical artifacts. The tool has been developed as an Eclipse plug-in in collaboration with IBM France

A Black-Box Computational Business Rules Extraction Approach through Test-Driven Development

Business rules extraction is an important activity in situations in which a software system becomes obsolete and needs to be replaced by a newer system, since the replacing system needs to satisfy the business rules embedded in the legacy software system. In this paper, we investigate an approach in which the computational business rules of a legacy software system can be extracted given previously generated output of the system and without requiring access to the system’s source code. Furthermore, extracted computational business rules are validated automatically with minimal involvement of domain experts through Test-Driven Development (TDD) such that test cases are constructed from historic output of the system. The proposed approach is applied to extract the computational business rules of a large-scale governmental payroll legacy software system. The study results demonstrate that the suggested approach extracted computational business rules van meet a substantial number of test cases. Thus, the efforts involving domain experts can be reduces to analyze such instances

Getting Relational Database from Legacy Data-MDRE Approach

The previous management information systems turning on traditional mainframe environment are often written in COBOL and store their data in files; they are usually large and complex and known as legacy systems. These legacy systems need to be maintained and evolved due to several causes, including correction of anomalies, requirements change, management rules change, new reorganization, etc. But, the maintenance of legacy systems becomes over years extremely complex and highly expensive, In this case, a new or an improved system must replace the previous one. However, replacing those systems completely from scratch is also very expensive and it represents a huge risk. Nevertheless, they should be evolved by profiting from the valuable knowledge embedded in them. This paper proposes a reverse engineering process based on Model Driven engineering that presents a solution to provide a normalized relational database which includes the integrity constraints extracted from legacy data. A CASE tool CETL: (COBOL Extract Transform Load) is developed to support the proposal. Keywords: legacy data, reverse engineering, model driven engineering, COBOL metamodel, domain class diagram, relational database

Un Framework dirigé par les modèles pour l'extraction de règles métier à partir d'applications COBOL

National audienceCompanies rely on the logic embedded in their Information Systems; that are often legacy applications not designed to represent and operationalize business logic independently from the technical aspects of the applications. Consequently, legacy systems are not able to respond quickly to the new requirements constantly demanded by the market. Discovering and tuning business logic in a legacy system, are time-consuming and error-prone activities, since each time the source code must be analysed, modi fied and tested. In order to simplify these activities, this paper proposes a model driven engineering framework for extracting business logic. Model Driven Engineering is used to ease the discovery and representation of the extracted logic providing understandable output artifacts.Les entreprises s'appuient sur la logique métier encodée dans leurs systèmes d'information. Ce sont souvent des applications existantes qui ne sont pas conçues pour représenter et operationnaliser cette logique independamment des aspects techniques. Par consequent, ces systèmes ne sont pas capables de répondre rapidement aux nouvelles exigences requises par le marche. La découverte et la gestion de la logique métier dans les applications sont des activités qui consomment beaucoup de temps et qui sont sources d'erreurs, car à chaque fois le code doit être analyse, modifié et testé. Afin de simplifier ces activites, ce papier propose un framework dirigé par les modèles pour l'extraction de la logique m étier. L'Ingénierie Dirigée par les Modèles est utilisée pour découvrir et répresenter la logique extraite en fournissant des artefacts en sortie qui aident à sa comprehension

Agile model-driven re-engineering

In this paper we describe an Agile model-driven engineering (MDE) approach, AMDRE, for the re-engineering of legacy systems. The objective is to support the reuse of business-critical functionality from such systems and the porting of legacy code to modernised platforms, together with technical debt reduction to improve the system maintainability and extend its useful life. AMDRE uses a lightweight MDE process which involves the automated abstraction of software systems to UML specifications and the interactive application of refactoring and rearchitecting transformations to remove quality flaws and architectural flaws. We demonstrate the approach on Visual Basic, COBOL and Python legacy codes, including a finance industry case. Significant quality improvements are achieved, and translation accuracy over 80\% is demonstrated. In comparison to other MDE re-engineering approaches, AMDRE does not require high MDE skills and should be usable by mainstream software practitioners

Analysis of Legacy System in Software Application Development: A Comparative Survey

Software evolution is one of the challenging issues in today’s business environment. It is necessary for the organizations, which make use of Information, and Communication Technologies will have to align their business processes to compete with global business. The existing large software systems (“legacy” systems) have never been built to cope with the current business requirement for their poor coding, design structures, logic and documentation. Moreover, Legacy applications have various problems such as lack of up to-date documentation, skilled man power, resources of the Legacy applications, and high maintenance costs. Even though the Legacy system is obsolete, it contains detailed business rules and in continuous use, because it satisfies the users' needs and forms the backbone of the information flow of organization. One of the possible solutions is to refactor or modernize those systems into a new platform. It is necessary to analyse the existing legacy system for better understanding the business logic and its functionalities. This paper analyses various techniques proposed for understanding Legacy systems in existence