Reverse-engineering Cobol via formal methods

We describe methods and software tools which aid in reverse-engineering COBOL application programs back to the specification stage (and in validating them against the specification). The aim is to create object-oriented abstractions from the implementation which capture the design concepts accurately, and the central process which the tools support is ‘transformation from formalism to formalism’, first from COBOL to the intermediate language UNIFORM, then from UNIFORM to a functional description language, and then to the specification language Z. In the process data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams and call-graph, and other types of information, are extracted from the code.