Verifying the Design of an Outsourced COBOL System With IntensiVE

Companies nowadays rely on outsourcing for the implementation of their software. While outsourcing can reduce the actual development costs for a piece of software, it can also reduce a company's control over the quality of the delivered software. In light of obtaining maintainable software, it is however important that the delivered software is well-structured and obeys the various design rules that were postulated by a company using an outsourcing partner. This paper reports on a collaboration between academia and industry, where the research tool IntensiVE has been applied to verify the design rules underlying a large-scale COBOL system.