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COBOL's enduring dominance
  • Oct 6, 2025

COBOL's enduring dominance

An estimated 220 billion to 800 billion lines of COBOL code remain in active use across global enterprises. Over 80% of organizations anticipate these systems will outlast their current workforce. COBOL Colleague transforms the workforce crisis into an opportunity by preserving the business intelligence embedded in your code—creating a permanent knowledge base that outlasts any individual developer.

Extracting and explaining business functions from COBOL
  • Aug 16, 2025

Extracting and explaining business functions from COBOL

Your COBOL systems support the most critical objectives of your business. Phase Change Software LLC's COBOL Colleague captures institutional knowledge automatically by slicing your code to reveal complete business functions—every derivation, condition, and dependency that influences each output field. Instead of spending months documenting systems, our AI extracts […]

The cognitive effort behind understanding code
  • May 28, 2025

The cognitive effort behind understanding code

“I still think that one of the finest tests of programming ability is to hand the programmer about 30 pages of code and see how quickly he can read through and understand it.” – Bill Gates Various research suggests that reading, editing, and navigating code encompasses significant cognitive effort beyond simply writing new code. And […]

How AI can improve software development
  • Jan 25, 2022

How AI can improve software development

Transforming business operations is a constant need, and the pandemic-prompted emphasis on modernizing legacy computing systems has forced organizations across industries to accelerate their modernization plans. The problem with mainframe modernization, however, is that today’s code search tools, linters, and program analysis tools are deficient when it comes to mitigating the risks associated with improving […]

COBOL defects’ paper coauthored by Phase Change scientists wins IEEE distinguished paper award
  • Oct 6, 2021

COBOL defects’ paper coauthored by Phase Change scientists wins IEEE distinguished paper award

A technical paper co-authored by current and former Phase Change research scientists, and presented at the 2021 annual ICSME event, won a Distinguished Paper Award from the IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE). The paper, “Contemporary COBOL: Developers’ Perspectives on Defects and Defect Location,” was co-authored by current Phase Change Senior Research […]

Leveraging AI to close the application knowledge gap
  • May 25, 2021

Leveraging AI to close the application knowledge gap

Although the modern enterprise moves quickly to adopt and support helpful new technologies, most organizations must continue to rely on their legacy systems for core functions. Legacy applications struggle to evolve fast enough to support shifting and evolving organization demands. The companies frequently try alternate strategies to keep pace, such as building on top of […]