COBOL Applications Research Articles

Extracting Business Rule from existing COBOL programs for Redevelopment

The paper describes an industrial business study carried out to regain the business knowledge embedded in a legacy COBOL application. The aim of this work was to extract out the information required to re- implement the Legacy programs in a new client/server environment. The progress solution is in four step. Firstly, the programs were restructured, secondly the programs were sliced into business logic modules, third the business modules were subjected to a multi view analysis and finally the views were integrated into a unified documentation describing the data, decision and procedural flow of each program slice.

Reducing operational costs through MIPS management

We focus on an approach to reducing the costs of running applications. MIPS, which is a traditional acronym for millions of instructions per second, have evolved to become a measurement of processing power and CPU resource consumption. The need for controlling MIPS attributed costs is indispensable given their significant contribution to operational costs. In this paper we investigate a large mainframe production environment running 246 Cobol applications of an organization operating in the financial sector. We found that the vast majority of the top CPU intensive operations in the production environment involve the use of DB2. We propose approaching portfolio-wide efforts to reduce CPU resource consumption from the source code perspective. Our technique is low-risk, low-cost and involves SQL code improvements of small scale. We show how to analyze a mainframe environment in an industrial setting, and to locate the most promising source code segments for optimizing runtime usage. Our approach relies on the mainframe usage data, facts extracted from source code, and is supported by a real-world SQL tuning project. After applying our technique to a portfolio of Cobol applications running on the mainframe our estimates suggested a possible drop in the attributed monthly CPU usage by as much as 16.8%. The approach we present is suited for facilitation within a mainframe environment of a large organization.

Recovering management information from source code

IT has become a production means for many organizations and an important element of business strategy. Even though its effective management is a must, reality shows that this area still remains in its infancy. IT management relies profoundly on relevant information which enables risk mitigation or cost control. However, the needed information is either missing or its gathering boils down to daunting tasks. We propose an approach to recovery of management information from the essence of IT; the software’s source code. In this paper we show how to employ source code analysis techniques and recover management information. In our approach we exploit the potential of the concealed data which resides in the source code statements, source comments, and also compiler listings. We show how to depart from the raw sources, extract data, organize it, and eventually utilize so that the bit level data provides IT executives with support at the portfolio level. Our approach is pragmatic as we rely on real management questions, best practices in software engineering, and also IT market specifics. We enable, for instance, an assessment of the IT-portfolio market value, support for carrying out what-if scenarios, or identification and evaluation of the hidden risks for IT-portfolio maintainability. The study is based on a real-life IT-portfolio which supports business functions of an organization operating in the financial sector. The IT-portfolio comprises Cobol applications run on a mainframe with the total number of lines of code amounting to over 18 million. The approach we propose is suited for facilitation within a large organization. It provides for a fact-based support for strategic decision making at the portfolio level.

Technical forum: Using logical data models for understanding and transforming legacy business applications

Many legacy applications perform essential business functions; yet, due to a number of factors, modifying such applications in order to accommodate new business requirements can be troublesome. Such factors include: the volume of code in a typical application, logical code structure that has deteriorated as updates have accumulated over time, functional redundancy, code structure that reflects the dated technology on which it was built, and scarce technical skills. We have argued that the consequent difficulty of understanding and modifying legacy code can be ameliorated through the use of logical data models. In the Mastery project, we are developing both algorithms for extracting logical data models from legacy COBOL applications and software tools that use the generated models to query and transform the code from which the models are derived.

Graph‐based tools for re‐engineering

AbstractMaintenance of legacy systems is a challenging task. Often, only the source code is still available, while design or requirements documents have been lost or have not been kept up‐to‐date with the actual implementation. In particular, this applies to many business applications which are run on a mainframe computer and are written in COBOL. Many companies are confronted with the difficult task of migrating these systems to a client/server architecture with clients running on PCs and servers running on the mainframe. REforDI (REengineering for DIstribution) is a graph‐based environment supporting this task. REforDI provides integrated code analysis, re‐design, and code transformation for COBOL applications. To prepare the application for distribution, REforDI assists in the transition to an object‐based architecture, according to which the source code is subsequently transformed into Object COBOL. Internally, REforDI makes heavy use of generators to reduce the implementation effort and thus to enhance adaptability. In particular, graph‐based tools for re‐engineering are generated from a formal specification which is based on programmed graph transformations. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The case for continued Cobol education

Many educators are reexamining their curricula's content and scope to more successfully market graduates from their information systems programs. Meanwhile, business and industry IS managers have similar concerns about the continued need to maintain the large inventory of legacy code while also developing new systems. Cobol applications and mainframe computing continue to dominate a large segment of the business community in which conventional data- and transaction-processing requirements still drive major applications. The requirement to maintain existing Cobol applications supports continued demand for new Cobol programmers. Furthermore, e-commerce applications will require linking existing mainframe applications to the Internet, occupying much of the IS activity for the foreseeable future. In accessing the IS manager's view and the academic's view of Cobol's future, the survey presented found that 95% of its academic respondents and 90% of the IS managers polled want the IS curricula to continue offering Cobol instruction. Also, nearly 90% of IS managers indicate that Cobol instruction in colleges should cover both Cobol's OO and Web based features.

Mapping Procedural Patterns to Object-Oriented Design Patterns

This paper presents a new approach to the use of design patterns for the reengineering of legacy code, using a mapping from procedural design patterns to object-oriented patterns. We show also how object-oriented design patterns can be formalised and correctness conditions for their application derived, in order to justify the preservation of functionality in the reengineering process. We give examples taken from case studies of reengineering legacy COBOL applications.

Reverse‐engineering cobol via formal methods

AbstractWe describe methods and software tools which aid in reverse‐engineering COBOL application programs back to specifications (and in validating them against specifications). The aim is to create object‐based abstractions from the implementation to capture design and functionality. The central process which the tools support is ‘transformation from formalism to formalism’, first from COBOL to the intermediate language Uniform, then from Uniform to a functional description language, and then to the specification language Z. In the process, dataflow diagrams, entity‐relationship diagrams and call‐graphs, and other types of information, are extracted from the code.

Accessing OSI virtual terminal services from Cobol application programs

Application programs access Open System Interconnection services through a Programmatic Interface. This Programmatic Interface should be made available to users of high level languages most commonly used for programming applications. This paper presents a Cobol oriented programmatic interface giving access to the Presentation Virtual Terminal Services of CII-HB and HIS Distributed Systems Architecture, DSA, which is built in accordance with ISO reference model for OSI. The virtual terminal model used is described in terms of presentation objects and their attributes, as well as the operations performed on these objects. A correspondance is given between this model and the COBOL communication model.