Analyzing PL/1 Legacy Ecosystems: An Experience Report

This paper presents a case study of analyzing a legacy PL/1 ecosystem that has grown for 40 years to support the business needs of a large banking company. In order to support the stakeholders in analyzing it we developed St1-PL/1 — a tool that parses the code for association data and computes structural metrics which it then visualizes using top-down interactive exploration. Before building the tool and after demonstrating it to stakeholders we conducted several interviews to learn about legacy ecosystem analysis requirements. We briefly introduce the tool and then present results of analysing the case study. We show that although the vision for the future is to have an ecosystem architecture in which systems are as decoupled as possible the current state of the ecosystem is still removed from this. We also present some of the lessons learned during our experience discussions with stakeholders which include their interests in automatically assessing the quality of the legacy code.