Mainframe Migration Based on Screen Scraping

Companies possess a history and large array of legacy information systems that consume a great part of their IT budget in operations and maintenance. These systems are mission-critical, and they cannot be fully discarded since they retain business rules and provide information that is not available anywhere else. Unfortunately, decades-old legacy systems cannot easily withstand modification. Mainframes specifically conglomerate most of these legacy systems. Although there are some white-box solutions for migrating mainframe systems, such solutions lack systematicity and do not provide mechanisms for verifying business rules preservation. Hence, this paper presents a black-box solution (ignoring the internal structure of COBOL programs) which uses a screen scraping technique for migrating mainframe systems toward JavaFX and relational databases. Together with this solution, this paper provides an automatic verification technique to check if the recreated system reflects all the embedded business logic. This proposal has been designed and developed in the context of an industrial project, in which the solution has already migrated 43,000,000 mainframe screens from four systems. The main implication for researchers and practitioners is that screen scraping has proved to be feasible for migrating mainframe systems in large-scale projects within a manageable time-frame while preserving business.