It is common that due to the pressure of business, banking systems evolve and grow fast and even the slightest wrong decision may result in losing control over the codebase in long term. Once it happens, the business will not drive developments any more, but will be constrained by maintenance preoccupations. As easy is to lose control, as hard is to regain it again. Software comprehension and refactoring are the proper means for reestablishing governance over the system, but they require sophisticated tools and methods that help analyzing, understanding and refactoring the codebase. This paper tells a true story about how control has been lost and regained again in case of a real banking system written in PL/SQL programming language.
BibTeX:
@InProceedings{NFB11,
author = {Nagy, Csaba and Ferenc, Rudolf and Bakota, Tibor},
title = {A True Story of Refactoring a Large Oracle {PL/SQL} Banking System},
booktitle = {Industrial Track of the 8th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2011)},
year = {2011},
address = {Szeged, Hungary},
month = sep,
keywords = {Oracle PL/SQL, Refactoring, Software Quality Assurance},
numpages = {4},
}