The COBOL Problem

Nearly Identical

COBOL code has two large issues in general

• Data. The file layouts are very hard to work with. I know a lot about this.
• Processing. The code has crap implementations of common data structures. I know. I wrote some. There's more, we'll get to it.

We have -- for the most part -- two kinds of COBOL code in common use.

• Batch processing. Once upon a time, we called it "Programming in the Large." The Z/OS Job Control Language (JCL) was a kind of shell script or AWS Step Function state transition map among applications. This isn't easy to deal with because the overall data flow is not a simple Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG.) It has cycles and state changes.
• Interactive (once called "on-line") processing. We called it OLTP: On-Line Transaction Processing. There are two common frameworks, CICS and IMS, and both are complicated.

Okay. Big Breath. What do we *DO*?

Here's the free consulting part.

You have to run the new and old side-by-side until you're sick of the errors and poor performance of the old machine.

You have to migrate incrementally, one app at a time.

It's hellishly expensive to positively determine what the COBOL really did. You can't easily do a "clean-room" conversion by writing intermediate specifications. You must read the COBOL and rewrite it into Python (or Java or Scala or whatever.)

You cannot unit test your way to success here, because you never really knew what the COBOL does/did. All you can do is extract example records and use those to build Gherkin-language acceptance tests using a template like this. GIVEN a source document WHEN the app runs THEN the output document matches the example.

In effect, you're going to do TDD on the COBOL, replacing COBOL with Python essentially 1-for-1 until you have a test suite that passes.

Don't do this alphabetically, BTW.

The processing graph for COBOL will include three essential design patterns for programs. "Edit" programs validate and possibly merge input files. "Update" programs will apply changes to master files or databases. "Report" programs will produce useful reports and feeds for reporting systems that involve yet more data derivation and merging.

1. Find the updates. Convert them first. They will involve the most knowledge capture, A/K/A "Business Logic." There will be a lot of special cases and exceptions. You will find latent bugs that have always been there.
2. Convert the programs that produce files for the updates, working forward in the graph.
3. The "reporting" is generally a proper DAG, and should be easier to deal with than the updates and edits. You never know, but the reporting apps are filled with redundancy. Tons of reporting programs are minor variations on each other, often built as copy-pasta from some original text and then patched haphazardly. Most of them can be replaced with a tool to emit CSV files as an interim step.

Each converted application requires two new steps injected into the COBOL batch jobs.

• Before an update runs, the files are pushed to some place where they can be downloaded.
• The app runs as it always had. For now.
• After the update, the results are pushed, also.

This changes merely slow things down with file transfers. It provides fodder for parallel testing.

Then.

Two changes are made so the job now looks like this.

• Before an update runs, the files are pushed to some place where they can be downloaded. (No change here.)
• Kill time polling the file location, waiting for the file to be created externally. (The old app is still around. We could run it if we wanted to.)
• After the update, download the results from the external location.

This file-copy-and-parallel-run dance can, of course, be optimized if you take whole streams of edit-update processing and convert them as a whole.

Yes, But, The COBOL Is Complicated

No. It's not.

It's a lot of code working around language limitations. There aren't many design patterns, and they're easy to find.

1. Read, Validate, Write. The validation is quirky, but generally pretty easy to understand. In the long run, the whole thing is a JSONSchema document. But for now, there may be some data cleansing or transformation steps buried in here.
2. Merged Reading. Execute the Transaction. Write. The transaction execution updates are super important. These are the state changes in object classes. They're often entangled among bad representations of data.
3. Cached Data. A common performance tweak is to read reference data ("Lookups") into an array. This was often hellishly complex because... well... COBOL. It was a Python dict, for the love of God, there's nothing to it. Now. Then. Well. It was tricky.
4. Accumulators. Running totals and counts were essential for audit purposes. The updates could be hidden anywhere. Anywhere. Not part of the overall purpose, but necessary anyway.
5. Parameter Processing. This can be quirky. Some applications had a standard dataset with parameters like the as-of-date for the processing. Some applications prompted an operator. Some had other quirky ways of handling the parameters.

The bulk of the code isn't very complex. It's quirky. But not complicated.

The absolute worst applications were summary reports with a hierarchy. We called these "control break" reports. I don't know why. Each level of the hierarchy had its own accumulators. The data had to be properly sorted. It was complicated.

Do Not Convert these. Find any data cleansing or transformation and simply pour the data into a CSV file and let the users put it into a spreadsheet.

Right now. We have to keep the lights on. COBOL apps have to be kept operational to manage unemployment benefits through the pandemic.

But once we're out of this. We need to get rid of the COBOL.

And we need to recognize that all code expires and we need to plan for expiration.

[Good response](https://slott-softwarearchitect.bl...

Tom Roche<noreply@blogger.com>

2020-04-07 23:13:45.372000-04:00

[Good response]({filename}/blog/2020/04/2020_04_07-why_isnt_cobol_dead_or_why_didnt_it_evolve.rst), thanks.

Great post ... or great-sounding anyway, as I'...

Tom Roche<noreply@blogger.com>

2020-04-07 15:36:42.299000-04:00

Great post ... or great-sounding anyway, as I'll admit to having minimal exposure to COBOL. But since you seem to have had lots, perhaps you can answer this question: Why didn't COBOL evolve more successfully? I'm asking because I have had significant exposure to FORTRAN, the other surviving-at-scale 1st-generation language. By which I mean, there is still a lot of it "in production" in engineering and science, as opposed to

* Lisp: while it continues to be popular in some non-academic niches (e.g., Emacs), there is (IIRC, ICBW) no economically-significant long-lived software coded in any Lisp dialect.

* Algol: which is all-the-way dead. FORTRAN, OTOH, has survived precisely because it--and more importantly, related tools, esp compilers--has evolved to solve/overcome many (certainly not all!) of the sorts of pain-points you describe, while retaining the significant performance edge that (IMHO, ICBW) prevents challengers (e.g., Python) from dislodging it for tasks like (e.g.) running dynamical models (esp weather forecasting).

(Context: I spent several years early in my career...

Justin du Coeur<noreply@blogger.com>

2020-04-12 18:03:13.064000-04:00

(Context: I spent several years early in my career building a system in COBOL. I've since been through about forty languages, and am now a Scala geek.)

Huh. The interesting corollary of this approach (which, I agree, is likely the only practical way to go in many cases) is that step one can probably be done *automatically*. That is, I would do this as:

1. Write a COBOL-to-X translator, where X is a more-modern programming language that -- very important -- provides good refactoring tools. (I would of course use Scala; given that Scala is actually fairly popular in the finance world, that might actually be right in some cases.) Along with this, you'd need to write the necessary libraries and adapters for the data and environment.

2. Test the hell out of it, the way you describe.
3. Start refactoring the resulting monstrosity.

The heart of the current problem isn't just that COBOL is obsolete, it's that it predates the notion that refactoring *matters*; the result is that making incremental improvements is unreasonably hard. If you did a literal translation to a better language, the resulting code would still be horrible, but you would have a path forward.

And yes, I would bet that writing an automatic translator isn't all that hard, in the grand scheme of things. Trying to *analyze* COBOL code properly is likely impossible, but simply translating it, warts and all, is simply a routine cross-compiler -- a substantial project, but not a huge one.