ICL has bought the Amelio re-engineering tool from Chesham, Buckinghamshire-based Delta Software International, the UK subsidiary of Delta Software Technologies AG. It will be used to cut maintenance costs and help the conversion process from Cobol to Ada. During re-engineering, Amelio documents an original program in a connections list that shows logic flows and referenced paragraphs. It analyses that program, applies Jackson’s structured program, and identifies structure violations. The restructured program is documented using summaries, statistical analysis, and graphical images. ICL uses Delta processors in ADS, Delta’s Application Development Systems, and Delta says that Amelio is a path into ADS. The combination of ADS and Amelio means that dialects of Cobol 68, 74, and 85 may be re-engineered independent of hardware. The company’s computer-aided software engineering tools support over 25 mainframe and minicomputer systems. These include ICL VME; IBM MVS, CMS, DOS/VSE; DEC VMS; Unisys; Bull DPS6, DPS7, DPS8; Nixdorf, Prime, and Unix.
