Object-oriented analysis of COBOL

The object-oriented paradigm is considered as the one which best guarantees the investments for renewal. It allows one to produce software with high degrees of reusability and maintainability, and satisfying certain quality characteristics. These features are not obviously automatically guaranteed by the simple adoption of an object-oriented programming language, so a process of re-analysis is needed. In this view, several methods for reengineering old applications according to the object-oriented paradigm have been defined and proposed. A method and tool (C₂O², COBOL to Object-Oriented) for analyzing COBOL applications in order to extract its object-oriented analysis is presented. The tool identifies classes and their relationships by means of a process of understanding and refinement in which COBOL data structures are analyzed, converted into classes, aggregated, and simplified semi-automatically. The algorithm is also capable of detecting data structures which may cause problems in the Year 2000, as demonstrated with an example