An automated system for documentation of COBOL systems or programs

This paper presents a view of what constitutes good system/program documentation, the need for such documentation, and a broad overview of an automated system to provide this documentation. The system was developed at Clemson University's Division of Information Systems Development and can be used on any system written entirely in COBOL. Documentation information is extracted from a system descriptive data set and all programs listed as members in the system.Features provided by the system include expansion of COBOL and IDMS copy statements, printing of the linkage section (if applicable), extraction of all input/output verb statements used in the procedure division, table of contents generation, and automated block/database diagram generation. The system provides enough flexibility to allow any portion or an entire system to be input. Checklists of missing diagrams, reports, and programs not found in the specified library are also provided.