Towards managing environment dependence during legacy systems renovation and maintenance

Old legacy applications are often too much dependent on enclosing environment so when they are faced with environment changes they require significant efforts for adaptive maintenance or, in some cases, even complete replatforming. We present a generative approach for managing environment dependent code based on XML and XSLT technologies. The main advantage of the approach is that it could be easily used both during software renovation for customizing environment code generation and during regular maintenance for carrying out adaptive maintenance tasks. It was tested on industrial samples for dealing with environment specific code during conversion from Cobol to Java and subsequent results maintenance.