Visualising COBOL Legacy Systems with UML: An Experimental Report

Abstract

This chapter presents a report of an experimental approach that uses WSL as an intermediate language for the visualisation of COBOL legacy systems in UML. Key UML techniques are identified that can be used for visualisation. Many cases were studied, and one is presented in detail. The report concludes by demonstrating how this approach can be used to build a software tool that automates the visualisation task. Furthermore, understanding a system is of critical importance to a developer who must be able to understand the business processes being modeled by the system along with the system’s functionality, structure, events, and interactions with external entities. Such an understanding is of even more importance in reverse engineering. Although developers have the advantage of having the source code available, system documentation is often missing or incomplete, and the original users, whose requirements were used to design the system, are often long gone.