Cognac: A Framework for Documenting and Verifying the Design of Cobol Systems

For any non-trivial software project, architectural drift is a well-known problem. Over time, the design rules and guidelines governing the software project are no longer obeyed, resulting in that the software becomes more difficult to maintain. While there exist numerous tools - such as code checkers, architecture and design checkers, and source code query languages - that aid in alleviating this problem none of these approaches are tailored towards supporting one of the main languages still in use today in industry, namely Cobol. In this paper we present Cognac, an extension of the Intensive tool that allows for documenting and verifying design rules in Cobol systems. Next to discussing the architecture of Cognac, we present a validation of our tool on an industrial, large-scale Cobol system.