Continuing with our reverse engineering research line, today we present our work on the extraction of business rules from COBOL systems.

Organizations rely on the logic embedded in their information systems for their daily operations. This logic implements the business rules in place in the organization, which must be continuously adapted in response to market changes. This evolution implies understanding and evolving also the underlying software components enforcing those rules.

This is challenging because, first, the code implementing the rules is scattered throughout the whole system and, second, most of the time documentation is poor and out-of-date. This is especially true for older systems that have been maintained and evolved for several years (even decades). In those systems, it is not even clear which business rules are enforced nor whether rules are still consistent with the current organizational policies.

In this sense, the goal of this work is to facilitate the comprehension of legacy systems (in particular COBOL-based ones) by providing a model-driven reverse engineering framework able to extract and visualize the business logic embedded in them.

More specifically, in order to facilitate the comprehension and the evolution of COBOL-based systems, we propose a semi-automatic Business Rule Extraction (BREX) method, that aims at extracting the business logic hard-coded in a system as a set of business rules. These business rules can then be validated (or updated/reimplemented) by the company’s stakeholders.

We describe a new BREX approach for COBOL applications based on the principles of Model Driven Engineering (MDE). Thanks to the MDE techniques, we can work at a higher abstraction level on a homogeneous (model-based) representation of the system, which also allows us to benefit
from the plethora of available MDE tools for model manipulation, visualization and transformation.

The framework has been created in response to (and in cooperation with) the needs of IBM Rational Software Group to improve the reverse engineering services and tools they offer to their customers. The implementation of the framework has been integrated with IBM Rational Programming Patterns and
an early validation with IBM engineers has been performed.

This work was presented at the 2013 Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE), the premier research conference on the theory and practice of recovering information from existing software and systems.

As usual, you can find below the slides. The full paper can be downloaded here.

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