Modernization is the current buzzword in the information technology (IT) industry. Legacy IT applications are transformed, reengineered, and modernized to meet the needs of today’s world. Mobile devices are the hot products preferred by youth, as well as the working class. Providing IT applications compatible with mobile and other modern devices has become a necessity for many companies. Current IT requirements have produced considerable changes in the way services are offered by such companies.

Traditionally, IT systems were developed to run on mainframe and mid-range computers. Even today, much of the data resides in these legacy systems. Much of the data processing is done in batch mode, and thus information is not available in real time to end customers. Organizations are striving to provide up-to-date information in real time to customers. This will require converting batch processing to service-based transaction processing, which will process business transactions when and as they come. The challenge for companies, then, is to come up with suitable IT services to accommodate these legacy applications.

The authors of this paper have proposed a new static analysis-based solution for identifying services within a batch program. They applied their solution to real-time order processing COBOL code to demonstrate how it identifies services. The paper also presents a three-step generic algorithm that takes a program and associated global variables as inputs and provides a set of services as output. The proposed approach is evaluated through the analysis of three COBOL programs from the enterprise business world.

The authors have taken an innovative approach to a valid problem faced by companies today. This paper is a great initiative by the authors to kickstart further research to make the proposed technique more robust and useful.