A knowledge-based maintenance of legacy systems: METASOFT

Abstract

The maintenance of legacy systems is a continuous problem in the field of software maintenance. To assist in the maintenance of legacy systems, we have represented the legacy systems and the maintenance requirement in a compatible manner so that the maintenance requirement can be a clue for identifying the relevant program clauses and data items in the database. For this purpose, a maintenance component is represented by the maintenance mode (add, modify or delete) and property and key words. The corresponding information about the program's clauses is extracted from the source code of the legacy program by reverse engineering. The maintenance point identification algorithm-MPI algorithm-proposed in this research is theoretically complete and relatively efficient, and is proved so empirically Using this approach, the system METASOFT has been developed for the Korea Electric Power Corporation which uses the COBOL programs and IMS database. It turns out that the system is well accepted by the users. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.