Fujitsu Develops Technology to Automatically Extract Business Specifications in Programs
When migrating or rebuilding business systems, an essential first step before beginning design and development work is to understand the currently implemented system specifications, but in many cases where a business system has continually grown in scale and complexity through years of development, specification documents have not been updated, and a great deal of time is required for preparation. With technology that divides large-scale programs and extracts the business specifications in table form, and technology that rebuilds a table for the whole program from the separated tables, it is now possible to automatically extract business specifications implemented in large-scale programs as an easy-to-understand tables of conditions, increasing the efficiency of grasping the current specifications coded in the program.
In a test case that applied this technology to programs within Fujitsu, the time required to update the specification documents was reduced by one third, enabling increased efficiency in migrating to systems, such as cloud, that can flexibly respond to business changes, while also following the business specifications of existing business systems. With this technology, Fujitsu will support the digital transformation of their customers' business systems.
Currently, as ICT environments such as the cloud and mobile are developing, many companies are working to migrate or rebuild existing business systems in the cloud, or add new functionality such as mobile support. There is a need for systems to rapidly respond to changes post-migration, while at the same time there is a demand for them to follow current business specifications. Actual business systems, however, have in many cases become black boxes. This is because they have undergone long periods of improvement and maintenance, becoming more complicated programs, while specification documents have become outdated and those workers who had developed the system are no longer involved. As such, a great deal of time is required to understand the business specifications of current operations.
In order to migrate business systems to systems with more flexibility with regard to change, Fujitsu Laboratories aims to manage business specifications with tables of conditions, as in business rule management systems (BRMS), which can automatically execute business rules without creating programs. In order to accomplish this, it is first necessary to dig up business specifications from complicated existing programs, bring specification documents up to date, and rework the specifications into tables of conditions.
As for technologies for extracting tables of conditions, there is the method of using symbolic execution technology to extract the program's execution path and organize it as a table (Figure 2). This method, however, was difficult to use with large-scale business systems, because the number of execution paths becomes massive as the program becomes larger and more complicated, creating an issue of practicality.
Now, Fujitsu Laboratories has developed the industry's first technology to analyze large-scale programs in business systems, and then extract implemented business logic-based practices and calculation methods specifications in easy-to-understand tables of conditions.
With this newly developed technology, it has become possible to extract business specifications from complex, large-scale programs, which previously were not amenable to analysis. In an internal application of this technology to a large-scale COBOL program, it was demonstrated to increase the efficiency of creating business specifications, with the time required to redevelop specifications reduced by one-third. In addition, it was confirmed that tables of conditions extracted from large-scale programs of actual systems could be processed into BRMS rules.
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