Software Artifacts Extraction for Program Comprehension

The maintenance of legacy software applications is a complex, expensive, quiet challenging, time consuming and daunting task due to program comprehension difficulties. The first step for software maintenance is to understand the existing software and to extract the high level abstractions from the source code. A number of methods, techniques and tools are applied to understand the legacy code. Each technique supports the particular legacy applications with automated/semi-automated tool support keeping in view the requirements of the maintainer. Most of the techniques support the modern languages but lacks support for older technologies. This paper presents a lightweight methodology for extraction of different artifacts from legacy COBOL and other applications

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