------------------------------------------------------------------------------- B O S T O N U N I V E R S I T Y Computer Science Department C O L L O Q U I U M Wednesday December 15, 1993 3:00pm (Tea served at 2:30pm) Seminar Room / MCS 135 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some Issues with Legacy Systems in Industrial Computing Laurette Bradley GTE Laboratories Incorporated Waltham Massachusetts Many recent articles in trade and scholarly publications have highlighted the problems of dealing with legacy information systems in modern industrial computing. Although closely related to problems in Computer Science which have nice solutions, industrial problems are often so poorly structured and so highly constrained by idiosyncracies of the business process that standard approaches don't work. This talk will discuss one such problem: extraction of information from a legacy system through an informal interface. A standard rule of software engineering is to use only formal interfaces to other systems. However, older systems often were not built with Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and may provide only informal interfaces for interoperation. Informal interfaces for large, legacy systems can have some striking disadvantages: The "language" produced by the legacy system may not be formally defined anywhere. After a time, literally no one may know what is "legal" and what isn't. Also, the language often changes from time to time and place to place. In the face of these difficulties, how should parsers for such languages be built? A key to the solution of such problems is to understand the business process constraints, and to represent them so that 1) software can be structured to accomodate those constraints and 2) software can change gracefully as the constraints change. Host: Professor Azer Bestavros ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information contact Prof. Azer Bestavros -------------------------------------------------------------------------------