Re-engineering legacy Cobol programs

Abstract : This paper proposes a semi-automatic two-step process to re-engineer legacy Cobol programs into OO programs including automatic identification of instance variables and methods from Cobol code followed by semi-automatic optimization of the OO design produced in the first step. We describe several issues related to automatic feature identification and report our experiences using two different automatic approaches on sample industrial code. Then we describe four ways to improve an OO design including moving methods from one class to another, merging methods, splitting methods, and merging classes. This is done by analyzing class interaction diagrams, call graphs, and code and presenting potential optimization points to programmers.