Reverse engineering from COBOL to narrative specification

We describe a new reverse engineering technology to generate a narrative specification used by real-world maintainers which facilitates the understanding of business procedures in existing COBOL programs. It defines business process logic and how to recognize it in a program. It also defines how to generate narrative specifications based on this process logic. We also discuss a specification-based maintenance support system; proof-correction marking and parallel scrolling. Evaluations were made in collaboration with more than six software maintainers by inspecting 500 generated specifications from real programs of financial firms. The evaluation suggests that generated specifications are helpful in clarifying the program in terms of business procedures and in locating statements to be changed during software maintenance