Extracting object-oriented specification from procedurally oriented programs

There is an increasing demand to migrate legacy programs from the mainframe to networked workstation computers. An important prerequisite to such migrations is an adequate and up-to-date documentation of the programs. Since the programs often have to be redesigned, the documentation must reflect the current program design in such a manner that this may be used as a blueprint for reimplementation. If the programs are to be redesigned as object-oriented programs, then the documentation should also be object-oriented. The paper presents an approach to automatically extracting object-oriented design documentation from existing COBOL mainframe programs.