Flowchart Knowledge Extraction on RPG Legacy Code
Kochaporn Suntiparakoo, Yachai Limpiyakorn · 2013
RPG was originated as a report-building program developed by IBM. Many business applications are written in RPG, and they are often critical in the operations of enterprises. Applications written in RPG can be considered as legacy software. Through decades of use, these RPG legacy systems can be hard to maintain, improve, and expand, since there is a general lack of understanding of the systems. The supporting documentation may not be current as well due to many changes implemented into the software. This paper thus presents a method of flowchart knowledge extraction on RPG legacy code. The metadata is gathered from the input text file, then processed and mapped to DOT markup language format for flowchart rendering using visualization tool named Graphviz. The prototype implemented in this work would facilitate the understanding of RPG legacy code during software maintenance process.