1 research outputs found
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