Using Aspect Orientation in Understanding Legacy COBOL Code

Understanding and maintaining legacy COBOL systems are still a challenging task for both academic research and industry practice. With the development of aspect-oriented software engineering, aspect-oriented code comprehension and reengineering for COBOL software systems become a very promising research direction. In this paper, context aspect and error handling aspect, which are two most important aspects for COBOL code understanding, are defined. Furthermore, the approach for aspect location and operations in COBOL code is presented. Program slicing technique is adopted to locate aspect code from large COBOL systems. This paper reports our experience to date on the application of aspect-oriented program understanding in COBOL code, and more future work will be carry out shortly.