Zero documentation, full migration: AI solves the COBOL problem

Manual, line-by-line translation of hundreds of legacy COBOL applications was too slow, too risky, and nearly impossible to test reliably.

The existing approach created limitations:

• No reliable documentation for most applications
• Deeply entangled, decades-old business logic
• Heavy dependence on a decreasing pool of COBOL specialists
• Manual translation that couldn't scale to the size of the migration

As the migration scope grew, the traditional approach directly limited how fast  and how safely the organization could move to a modern, cloud-native architecture.

• Mapped each application's real behavior through massive automated testing
• Auto-generated a fresh PRD from verified, observed behavior not outdated documentation
• Rebuilt each application cloud-native from the regenerated requirements
• Reduced dependence on third-party COBOL-translation vendors and poor internal expertise

This allowed the migration to proceed from verified, current behavior instead of incomplete legacy documentation.

• Migration time compressed by approximately 50% compared to traditional line-by-line translation
• Reduced dependence on COBOL specialists by over 70%
• Delivered a repeatable migration playbook reusable across hundreds of remaining applications
• Cut estimated third-party vendor costs by roughly 40%