OpenCBS: An Open-Source COBOL Defects Benchmark Suite
Dylan Lee, Austin Henley, Bill Hinshaw, Rahul Pandita

TL;DR
This paper introduces OpenCBS, an open-source benchmark suite of COBOL programs with defects, aimed at aiding research and tool development for maintaining legacy COBOL systems amid workforce shortages.
Contribution
It presents a novel open-source benchmark suite of COBOL programs with defects, created from forum data, to support testing and development of debugging tools.
Findings
Provides a publicly available COBOL defect benchmark
Facilitates research in debugging and maintenance tools
Encourages community contributions to COBOL tool development
Abstract
As the current COBOL workforce retires, entry-level developers are left to keep complex legacy systems maintained and operational. This creates a massive gap in knowledge and ability as companies are having their veteran developers replaced with a new, inexperienced workforce. Additionally, the lack of COBOL and mainframe technology in the current academic curriculum further increases the learning curve for this new generation of developers. These issues are becoming even more pressing due to the business-critical nature of these systems, which makes migrating or replacing the mainframe and COBOL anytime soon very unlikely. As a result, there is now a huge need for tools and resources to increase new developers' code comprehension and ability to perform routine tasks such as debugging and defect location. Extensive work has been done in the software engineering field on the creation of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Software Testing and Debugging Techniques · Software System Performance and Reliability
