Towards a user-controlled software renovation factory

Part of software maintenance consists of 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. 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 on an experiment with a COBOL transformation factory which has been used for the conversion of a real world business application system