COBOL RuleForge: Extracting Clarity from Complexity

Tool Description

COBOL RuleForge, a tool designed to extract Business Rules from legacy COBOL codes and then summarize them. The tool is developed to help developers and practitioners to understand the business rules in the legacy COBOL code. The tool is developed using the Python programming. It uses few-shot prompting with Google's Gemini-Pro model to extract the business rules and then summarize them in a markdown file.

Installation

Requirements

Hardware and Operating System:

Windows 8/10/11, macOS 12+, or Linux (Ubuntu 20.04+)
Processor: Intel Pentuim, Core i5/i7/i9 or Ultra, AMD Ryzen 5 or better
RAM: Minimum of 8GB required if the evaluation notebooks are to be run locally
Storage: 25 MB

The software was tested on a Windows 11 system with 16 GB RAM and NVIDIA MX350 2GB GPU.
Software:

Python version 3.11 +
Jupyter version 1.0.0, if you're planning to run the evaluation notebooks
google-generativeai version 0.4.0
streamlit version 1.38.0 for GUI frontend
rouge-score version 0.1.2 for evaluation scoring
evaluate version 0.4.1
glob2

Running the project

CLI Usage:

STEP1: Clone or download this github repository:

git clone https://github.com/Chiranjeevi2001/cobol-ruleforge.git

STEP2: Navigate into the ../cobol-ruleforge/Test_COBOLs/InputFiles directory

cd ./cobol-ruleforge/Test_COBOLs/InputFiles

pwd

We have provided a few COBOL files here for testing. You can add additional files here along with them.

Navigate back to ./cobol-ruleforge/src folder

cd ../../src

STEP3: Get the Gemini-Pro API key from Google AI Studio, and paste it in the given space in all of the summarization scripts.

STEP4: Run the preprocess.py file to preprocess the input COBOL files

python preprocess.py

STEP5: Navigate back to the ./cobol-ruleforge folder, and provide execute access to Summarize.sh file

chmod +x Summarize.sh

STEP6: Execute Summarize.sh

./Summarize.sh

STEP7: The Business Rules summary output will be generated in the ./Test_COBOLs/Output_BR_Summary directory, and the Code summary output will be generated in the ./Test_COBOLs/Output_Code_Summary directory

GUI Usage:

STEP1: Clone or download this github repository

git clone https://github.com/Chiranjeevi2001/cobol-ruleforge.git

STEP2: Navigate to the ./cobol-ruleforge/UI directory

cd ./cobol-ruleforge/UI

STEP3: Run the following command to open the GUI screen on your web browser

streamlit run BR_extractor_ui.py --server.enableXsrfProtection false

You should be able to see the GUI in your browser

STEP4: Follow the steps in the screen to get the Business Rules summary.

Approach diagram

COBOL RuleForge uses Google's Gemini-Pro model to extract Business Rules from COBOL files and summarize them. To understand the need of extracting business rules, the summaries generated from business rules are compared against traditional code summaries generated by the model. The model is trained on the COBOL dataset and the summaries are generated using the few-shot prompting technique. The design of COBOL RuleForge is shown below:

Usage snippet screenshot (GUI)

Goal

Helping developers and practitioners to better understand the context behind legacy COBOL codes. Extracting and summarizing business rules will give them a better clarity about the functionality of the code.

Results

TBD