GSE European Working Group
“European Enterprise Modernization for z/OS”
The working groups of Guide Share Europe provide a platform to exchange practical experience in all aspects of IT. The information enables the members to ensure the effectivity of their installations, to make well-informed decisions and to influence product development by IBM and its partners.
The Working Group “European Enterprise Modernization for z/OS” focusses on modernization on IBM mainframes and RDz. The meeting hold in Paris, France.
- 24 – 26 March 2015, Paris, France
Martin Herbst, Delta Software Technology, discussed in detail how to obtain a real understanding of the legacy applications in order to considerably facilitate application modernization in all its forms.
How to really understand COBOL and PL/I applications
- 25 March 2015 13:30 – 14:30
The bulk of today’s productive COBOL and PL/I applications have been developed many years or even decades ago. Only in very rare cases the original designers and developers are still in charge. Usually, their successors (“inheritors”) or external service providers are maintaining and modernizing the applications or working on the re-implementation of their functionality in modern languages.
In these cases it does not suffice to retrieve details or to track single fields. Quite the contrary, it is about getting a detailed and full comprehension of the application in its entirety. The older and the more complex the applications are, the more knowledge about the applications is already lost. It gets more and more difficult to really understand the applications.
- How do you obtain reliable information on the current implementation, about the inner structure of the COBOL and PL/I applications, about contexts and dependencies?
- How do you identify code that’s no longer necessary, i.e. dead code, dead data definitions, not only within single programs but across complex Copy Book, macro and include hierarchies?
- How do you get a clear view on the code structures, on the logical connections of procedures, on endlessly cascades conditions?
- How do you distinguish framework coding form business logic?
These are only some of the questions that we answered by presenting a concept and tool that helps you to better understand and securely modernise native or generated COBOL and PL/I applications, that allows you to recognize patterns, to execute focused analysis and which can be perfectly tailored to your needs.
Our Presenter
Martin Herbst
Martin Herbst is Chief Architect at Delta Software Technology.
GSE Working Groups
GSE is a non-profit association of companies, organisations and individuals who are involved in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions based on IBM architectures. GSE is an effective forum supporting the needs of today's ICT professional.
For more information on GSE please visit www.gse.org
Please contact us for further information on how to really understand COBOL and PL/I applications via
You will find our Lecture on SlideShare ...