Title: Cost-effective modernisation of COBOL legacy applications

Authors: Christophe Gaie; Franck Barbier

Addresses: Direction Interministérielle du Numérique (DINUM), Paris 7ème, France ' LIUPPA, Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, Avenue de l'Université BP 576 64012 PAU cedex, France

Abstract: This paper deals with the problem of reducing technical debt and modernising legacy applications, particularly COBOL heritage on 'mainframe' computers (a.k.a. 'mainframes'). The proposed approach aims at offering a solution, which is efficient through a strong relation with a cost-effective method about transformation. Indeed, literature shows both technical and scientific solutions whose economic facet is often totally ignored, letting us understand that redoing all from scratch might be cheaper, but proofs about this are urgently expected, an often missing link. Indeed, it is essential to remind that the cost of transformation is a critical concern, especially when the to-be-transformed applications rely on millions of lines of, very often, odd COBOL.

Keywords: legacy software; software heritage; cost-effective modernisation; common business oriented language; COBOL; reengineering; code migration.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSYSE.2021.113258

International Journal of Computational Systems Engineering, 2021 Vol.6 No.3, pp.115 - 122

Received: 12 May 2020
Accepted: 28 Jul 2020
Published online: 25 Feb 2021 *

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