COBREX: A Tool for Extracting Business Rules from COBOL

Abstract

COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) has had a strong presence for the last five decades and is still prevalent in the finance and banking sectors and other organizations. The systems which were earlier written in COBOL have now become legacy systems. Therefore, it has become essential to maintain and migrate these legacy COBOL systems. These legacy systems on which companies rely consist of embedded logic to run their business rules and day-to-day operations. Due to ever-changing requirements, these business rules need to be revisited and updated regularly. Understanding the code that enforces the business rules is critical for system evolution. However, this is time-consuming, laborious, and error-prone. Also, the documentation of these systems is sometimes inadequate and may be inconsistent with current organizational policies. Furthermore, the number of current-age developers working on COBOL has been drastically reduced, and they are mainly unfamiliar with legacy systems. To aid this, we propose a tool called COBREX to extract COBOL business rules using a CFG-based approach. The tool’s main aim is to help the researchers and practitioners to understand COBOL source code by extracting and comprehending the business rules. The demo of the tool can be found here - https://youtu.be/3QODmOkISL0 and the details of the tool can be found here -https://rishalab.github.io/COBREXdoc/.