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