Reverse engineering a visual age application

This paper is an industrial case study of how a VisualAge application system on an IBM mainframe was reverse engineered into a system reference repository. The starting point was the code fragments generated by the VisualAge interactive development tool. The results of the reverse engineering process were a use case documentation, a module documentation and a system reference repository. In these documents, the names of the data and functions were extended to be more understandable. The process was in the end fully automated and took three months to implement. The resulting documentation is now being used as a basis for re-implementing the system in Java.