Reverse-engineering Cobol via formal methods

We 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.