YOUR PROBLEM

Nobody knows how it works. Including the people who maintain it.

The system has been running for 15 years. The original developers are gone. The documentation—if it exists—was last updated in 2017. There are business rules scattered across COBOL, stored procedures, and configuration tables.

You need to modernize it. But first, you need to understand it.

THE LEGACY TRAP

Month 1-3

"Discovery phase"

Interview stakeholders. Read old documentation. Trace through code. Build a partial picture.

Month 4-9

"Build the new system"

Based on discovered requirements. Realize discovery was incomplete. Go back for more discovery.

Month 10-18

"Testing phase"

Run parallel systems. Compare outputs. Find discrepancies. Discover more undocumented behaviors. Update new system.

Month 19+

"The reckoning"

Deploy. Find edge cases in production. Emergency fixes. Stakeholder trust erodes. Consider rolling back.

Total cost: $2-5M. Timeline: 18-24 months. Success rate: ~40%.

THE INSIGHT

What if you could extract the specification from the code?

The knowledge is in the code. It's just buried under decades of implementation details. What if you could extract the business logic as an executable specification?

Not documentation. Not a summary. An executable specification that's mathematically equivalent to the original system—but readable, maintainable, and portable.

SEE IT IN ACTION

legacy-extraction

Watch a 47,000-line COBOL system get analyzed—including undocumented behaviors.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

Understand legacy systems

Extract the actual behavior—including undocumented edge cases—as executable specifications.

Prove migration equivalence

Mathematical proof that new system behaves identically to old. No "hope and test."

Incremental modernization

Extract specs from legacy. Run them on modern infrastructure. Migrate piece by piece with confidence.

Knowledge preservation

Tribal knowledge becomes formal specifications. Survives retirements and reorganizations.