Revitalizing modifiability of legacy assets
Niels Veerman · Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution Research and Practice · 2004
Abstract 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 © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.