Automating the modularization of large COBOL programs: application of an enabling technology for reengineering

Towards an Intelligent Software Maintenance Network

“…The combination of technical characteristics (expressiveness, persistence, extensibility) that is required to support intelligent software maintenance is found only in a very select group of proprietary software environments, most notably Reasoning Systems Inc.'s "Software Refinery" (Newcomb and Markosian, 1993). Such environments pose the following access problems:…”

A possible approach to object-oriented reengineering of Cobol programs

“…A key phase of the object -oriented reengineering and restructuring process is modularization, the replacement of a single large compilation unit with a functionally -equivalent collection of smaller units. Modularization [7] involves a broad range of non -localized changes across thousands of lines of code. These changes must preserve the functionality of the original system while improving its maintain ability.…”

Program understanding as constraint satisfaction

“…For instance, the 60,000 or so constraints we need to evaluate takes less than 25 seconds or so on a shared SPARCserver 1000 workstation. While 5000 statements is small compared to the sizes of real-world programs, it is within an order of magnitude of the size of modules in real-world programs or modules that have been created from legacy systems using semiautomatic techniques (Newcomb and Markosian, 1993). Other reverse and re-engineering toolsets such as Rigi (Müller et al, 1994) may be appropriately utilized in this process of source segmentation.…”

“…In fact, this is precisely the point of the PU-CSP stage for integrating these partial solution stages. Some work on semi-automatic modularization of COBOL program has already been done that has demonstrated that large COBOL programs can be broken into modules of 25,000 or so statements (Newcomb and Markosian, 1993). This is only a factor of 5 larger that the point that the CSP approach can comfortably handle, which makes it appear worthwhile to determine whether those techniques can be extended to break programs down into even smaller modules.…”