Abstract
Software written in legacy programming languages is notoriously ubiquitous and often comprises business-critical portions of codebases and portfolios. Some of these languages, like COBOL, mature, grow, and acquire modern tooling that makes maintenance activities more bearable. Others, like many fourth generation languages (4GLs), stagnate and become obsolete and unmaintained, which first urges and eventually forces migrating to other languages, if the software needs to be kept in production. In this paper, we dissect a software modernisation process endorsed by Raincode Labs, utilised in particular to migrate software from a 4GL called PACBASE, to pure COBOL. Having migrated upwards of 500 MLOC of production code to COBOL using this process, the company has ample experience with this process. Nevertheless, we identify some improvement points and explain the technical side of a possible solution, based on migration log differencing, that is currently being put to the test by Raincode migration engineers.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Raincode migration engineers Boris Pereira and Yannick Barthol for their collaboration, as well as the participants of the seminar SATToSE 2020, where an early version of this work was presented in June, for their feedback.
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Deknop, C., Fabry, J., Mens, K., Zaytsev, V. (2020). Improving a Software Modernisation Process by Differencing Migration Logs. In: Morisio, M., Torchiano, M., Jedlitschka, A. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12562. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64148-1_17
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