A practical system of COBOL program reuse for reengineering

Abstract

Transformation and reuse techniques have been discussed for many years, and it is even more important to apply these techniques in practice. This paper introduces our approach to combining transformation and semantic interface analysis for reuse of COBOL programs. In our approach, COBOL programs are reverse engineered to their designs represented in entity-relationship (ER) diagrams. Both the original code and obtained ER diagrams are used by semantic interface analysis. Reusable components are annotated with conditions which are needed for checking suitability and are saved in a reuse library for reuse and reengineering. Our method is demonstrated in detail through an example in this paper. Besides being practical, the advantages of the approach include the fact that a formal link between the original COBOL program and its design in an ER diagram form is retained, and both the program code and the design can be reused.