A-COBREX: A Tool for Identifying Business Rules in COBOL Programs

There are many organizations, especially in domains such as banking, insurance, airline that are looking for tools to identify and extract business rules from legacy mainframe code. Existing works have considered execution paths for a single business variable as the granularity of business rules which limits the identification of complex rules. In our work, we address this limitation and provide a tool called A-COBREX, which implements a novel technique to identify business rules involving multiple business variables from the source code. We have evaluated the same on 27 programs with ground truth annotations. It has a recall of 74.12% and precision of 62.21% for fuzzy match between ground truth and extracted rules. The screencast is available at https://youtu.be/adriX4q41PA, and the tool at https://github.com/SaravananKrishnan/BRE.