Recovering Intent of Code from RPG Legacy Source
Kochaporn Suntiparakoo, Yachai Limpiyakorn · 2014
Legacy software can be characterized as old software that continues to provide core services to an organization. Applications written in RPG can be considered as legacy software.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. 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 reverse engineering for recovering the intent of code from RPG legacy source. The metadata is gathered from the input RPG source by detecting and handling the program controls and operations. These metadata stored in the directed graph will then be mapped to DOT markup language format for flowchart rendering using visualization tool, Graphviz. The prototype implemented in this work would facilitate the understanding of RPG legacy code during software maintenance process.