Tools for Software System Understanding and Transformation

Development of a tool set to support software system understanding and transformation requires processes for extracting evolvable software components from existing software systems, managing these components, regenerating the original applications using the evolvable components, and synthesizing application extensions by composing and adapting evolvable components to new uses. There is an urgent immediate need for tools that facilitate rapid remediation of the Year 2000 date problem in existing DoD applications, written in Jovial, CMS2 and Assembler codes and older DoD languages in general. There is a longer term need to migrate such systems into Ada. This work is adapting and extending a highly innovative tool set for program understanding and transformation that supports evolutionary approach to software development and maintenance to support the Jovial and CMS2 languages. This tool set facilitates deriving new and modified applications principally from existing software, rather than by new development, and supports a semi-automated software evolution process.