Towards a user-controlled software renovation factory

Part of software maintenance consists in applying program transformations system-wide. In a number of recent papers, a factory approach has been advocated in which one program after another is fed to an assembly line that consists of a sequence of transformation tools. The general feeling seems to be that such factories have to be constructed and operated by specialists (the ‘vendors’). We think this is an undesirable situation. In this paper we present a software renovation factory which is, as much as possible, user controlled. The factory is controlled by means of a graphical user interface. Two modes of control are distinguished: an architectural mode where an operational renovation factory is constructed out of a set of available tools (parsers, unparsers, transformation modules), and an execution mode where the operational factory is applied for renovation purposes. We report about an experiment with a COBOL transformation factory which has been used for the conversion of a real-world business application system.