Technical forum: Using logical data models for understanding and transforming legacy business applications

Many legacy applications perform essential business functions; yet, due to a number of factors, modifying such applications in order to accommodate new business requirements can be troublesome. Such factors include: the volume of code in a typical application, logical code structure that has deteriorated as updates have accumulated over time, functional redundancy, code structure that reflects the dated technology on which it was built, and scarce technical skills. We have argued that the consequent difficulty of understanding and modifying legacy code can be ameliorated through the use of logical data models. In the Mastery project, we are developing both algorithms for extracting logical data models from legacy COBOL applications and software tools that use the generated models to query and transform the code from which the models are derived.

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