A formal mechanism for analysis and re-implementation of legacy programs

  • Authors:
  • Dimitrios Maglaras;Martin Doerr;Andrew Ware;Kostas Vassilakis;George Papadourakis

  • Affiliations:
  • Technological Educational Institution (TEI) of Crete, Heraklion, Greece;Institute of Computer Science, Heraklion, Greece;University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, UK;Technological Educational Institution (TEI) of Crete, Heraklion, Greece;Technological Educational Institution (TEI) of Crete, Heraklion, Greece

  • Venue:
  • SE '08 Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The need for information exchange is growing rapidly day by day and the formal development tools have been proven insufficient to serve this need. But what will happen with all those large software applications that have been developed in the past, using legacy development tools such as 3rd GLs, which are still working in business? There are many reasons why these applications need to be modified or reconstructed in order to keep on running effectively. This paper presents a formal mechanism for analysis and re-implementation of legacy (mainly data-processing) application systems. This mechanism forms the implementation of an automated procedure in the analysis of old software systems and is based on a software tool that will be able to extract useful information from their source code. The steps, which will be followed, are: Initially, a parser will extract the necessary information from the sources of the old application and store it in a text file in a form of transactions. Then a special tool will read the text file and execute the transactions to a specially configured database. Finally, another tool will be configured in order to retrieve the information from the database by executing queries to it.