Recovering user interface specifications for porting transaction processing applications

The Reverse Engineering group at EDS Research has developed software tools to mechanically assist in reengineering transaction processing applications. The authors apply the software tools to assist in converting a very large minicomputer application written in COBOL to run under CICS on an IBM mainframe. The two platforms provide very different user interfaces and computational environments. The user interacts with the minicomputer one field at a time, but interacts with CICS a full screen at a time. This and other major differences demand that any successful mechanical conversion strategy employ sophisticated feature extraction and restructuring techniques. They describe the problem of recovering the user interface specification and using the recovered specification to create the appropriate user interface in the target environment. Techniques such as data flow analysis and other formal analysis techniques appear to be too weak to guide the conversion, and that a priori programming knowledge must be encoded and applied to obtain a successful conversion