Some wells never dry [software maintenance]

Abstract

Summary form only given, as follows. According to a criticaster Wehkamp owns "fossil COBOL in rock". In 1995 Wehkamp decided to get rid of her mainframe. Her strategy was to stop development on her GCOS8 platform. The idea was that the mainframe would dry and eventually could be carried to her grave. Unfortunately this strategy did not work. In fact complexity has grown beyond control. In the first part of the paper, we give a detailed account of our experiences, our analysis and outline our new strategy: we will now first take out the data. Since 2000 Wehkamp has an architecture department. But what is she supposed to do? We found out that it doesn't work to proclaim the truth. In the second part of the paper we give an account of our ongoing quest for our place in the organization: at the moment we live by the IEEE 1471 model among others.