Extracting business logic from existing COBOL programs as a basis for redevelopment

The article describes an industrial pilot study carried out to regain the business knowledge embedded in a legacy COBOL application. The goal of the project was to weed out the information required to reimplement the ancient host programs in a new client/server environment. The solution followed a four-step process. First, the programs were restructured, secondly the programs were sliced into business logic modules, third the business modules were subjected to a multiview analysis and finally the views were integrated into a unified documentation describing the data, decision and procedural flow of each program slice.