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

A comparative evaluation of dynamic visualisation tools

Despite their potential applications in software comprehension, it appears that dynamic visualisation tools are seldom used outside the research laboratory. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of five dynamic visualisation tools - AVID, Jinsight, jRMTool, Together ControlCenter diagrams and Together ControlCenter debugger. The tools were evaluated on a number of general software comprehension and specific reverse engineering tasks using the HotDraw objectoriented framework. The tasks considered typical comprehension issues, including identification of software structure and behaviour, design pattern extraction, extensibility potential, maintenance issues, functionality location, and runtime load. The results revealed that the level of abstraction employed by a tool affects its success in different tasks, and that tools were more successful in addressing specific reverse engineering tasks than general software comprehension activities. It was found that no one tool performs well in all tasks, and some tasks were beyond the capabilities of all five tools. This paper concludes with suggestions for improving the efficacy of such tools

A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection

Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache

Domain-Specific Acceleration and Auto-Parallelization of Legacy Scientific Code in FORTRAN 77 using Source-to-Source Compilation

Massively parallel accelerators such as GPGPUs, manycores and FPGAs represent a powerful and affordable tool for scientists who look to speed up simulations of complex systems. However, porting code to such devices requires a detailed understanding of heterogeneous programming tools and effective strategies for parallelization. In this paper we present a source to source compilation approach with whole-program analysis to automatically transform single-threaded FORTRAN 77 legacy code into OpenCL-accelerated programs with parallelized kernels. The main contributions of our work are: (1) whole-source refactoring to allow any subroutine in the code to be offloaded to an accelerator. (2) Minimization of the data transfer between the host and the accelerator by eliminating redundant transfers. (3) Pragmatic auto-parallelization of the code to be offloaded to the accelerator by identification of parallelizable maps and reductions. We have validated the code transformation performance of the compiler on the NIST FORTRAN 78 test suite and several real-world codes: the Large Eddy Simulator for Urban Flows, a high-resolution turbulent flow model; the shallow water component of the ocean model Gmodel; the Linear Baroclinic Model, an atmospheric climate model and Flexpart-WRF, a particle dispersion simulator. The automatic parallelization component has been tested on as 2-D Shallow Water model (2DSW) and on the Large Eddy Simulator for Urban Flows (UFLES) and produces a complete OpenCL-enabled code base. The fully OpenCL-accelerated versions of the 2DSW and the UFLES are resp. 9x and 20x faster on GPU than the original code on CPU, in both cases this is the same performance as manually ported code.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, submitted to "Computers and Fluids" as full paper from ParCFD conference entr