Using design recovery techniques to transform legacy systems

Abstract

The year 2000 problem posed a difficult problem for many IT shops world wide. The most difficult part of the problem was not the actual changes to ensure compliance, but finding and classifying the data fields that represent dates. This is a problem well suited to design recovery. The paper presents an overview of LS/2000, a system that used design recovery to analyze source code for year 2000 risks and guide a source transformation that was able to automatically remediate over 99% of the year 2000 risks in over three billion lines of production IT source.