Reverse engineering COBOL through the use of automatically applied program transformations

The maintenance of old but frequently used software systems remains a major problem for many organizations. Many COBOL programs, comprising billions of lines of code and developed many years ago, are in widespread use. These old programs need to be refashioned to take advantage of the latest operating system features, graphical user interfaces, databases, etc. Recreating these application programs from scratch is a laborious task. Reverse engineering tools may be used to extract the high level design and specification from such application programs thereby allowing them to be better understood and, consequently, making them easier to maintain and to update. However, if a software system is to undergo major refinement then its detailed low level design must be, extracted. Commercial reverse engineering tools produce low level designs which are difficult to understand and may require significant human interaction in order to perform the extraction