Visually Exploring Control Flow Graphs to Support Legacy Software Migration

Abstract

Migrating legacy systems to new platforms represents a frequent challenge to leverage earlier massive capital investments. Prerequisite for performing migration include profound understanding of the system and its components – a cost intensive task if systems and their components are monolithic and highly coupled, and up-to-date documentation and system models do not exist, like in most cases. We propose a software exploration tool that supports migration of legacy systems. It facilitates identification of high-level code components and their interaction in complex legacy systems written in C. Developers can analyze (a) how the system is collaborating with environmental systems and (b) how the core business logic is intertwined with platform-specific code. The tool’s key features are (a) extracting control flow graphs and interpreting them within the system’s static architecture and (b) providing a visualization front-end for efficient exploration of the analysis results.