Niels P. Veerman

Revitalizing modifiability of legacy assets

The modifiability of Cobol legacy code is discussed and an approach is proposed to improve the modifiability using automatic restructuring transformations. An algorithm is presented that enables the application of these transformations to large industrial Cobol systems. The transformations were adapted to a system of 80 000 lines of code by extending them with new transformations and transformation patterns. The resulting source code is analysed and discussed. Two case studies (over 5 million lines of code in total) with real-life Cobol programs show the large-scale application of the transformations. Copyright

A language independent framework for context-sensitive formatting

Automated formatting is an important technique for the software maintainer. It is either applied separately to improve the readability of source code, or as part of a source code transformation tool chain. In this paper we report on the application of generic tools for constructing formatters. In an industrial setting, automated formatters need to be tailored to the requirements of the customer. The (legacy) programming language or dialect and the corporate formatting conventions are specific and non-negotiable. Can generic formatting tools deal with such unexpected requirements? Driven by an industrial case of nearly 80 thousand lines of COBOL code, several limitations in existing formatting technology have been addressed. We improved its flexibility by replacing a generative phase by a generic tool, and we added a little expressiveness to the formatting back end. Most importantly, we employed a multi-stage formatting framework that can cope with any kind of formatting convention using more computational power

Towards lightweight checks for mass maintenance transformations

We propose a lightweight, practical approach to check mass maintenance transformations. We present checks for both transformation tools and transformed source code, and illustrate them using examples of real-world transformations. Our approach is not a fully fledged, formal one but provides circumstantial evidence for transformation correctness, and has been applied to the mass maintenance of industrial Cobol systems.

Automated Mass Maintenance of Software Assets

This is research summary of a PhD project in the area of massive software maintenance automation. We explain the context, approach, and contributions

Automated mass maintenance of a software portfolio

This is an experience report on automated mass maintenance of a large Cobol software portfolio. A company in the financial services and insurance industry upgraded their database system to a new version, affecting their entire software portfolio. The database system was accessed by the portfolio of 45 systems, totalling nearly 3000 programs and covering over 4 million lines of Cobol code. We upgraded the programs to the new database version using several automatic tools, and we performed an automated analysis supporting further manual modifications by the system experts. The automatic tools were built using a combination of lexical and syntactic technology, and they were deployed in a mass update factory to allow large-scale application to the software portfolio. The updated portfolio has been accepted and taken into production by the company, serving over 600 employees with the new database version. In this paper, we discuss the automated upgrade from problem statement to project costs.