GrammaTech Awarded NASA Contract to Develop Incremental Code Migration Techniques

Ithaca, NY — GrammaTech, Inc. announced today that it has been awarded a $69,897 Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I contract by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Upon completion of this six-month contract, GrammaTech will be eligible to compete for up to $600,000 in Phase II SBIR funding. Under terms of the agreement, GrammaTech will develop techniques for incremental migration of legacy code to modern languages.

GrammaTech will develop software technology for the interactive incremental conversion of legacy code to other languages. The goal is to make it cost-effective to migrate code from one language to another. The technology will allow a user to first transform the code to make it amenable to translation, then manage the semi-automatic translation to the new language, then finally allow the user to transform the translated code to allow it to be easily maintainable. The implementation of this technology will combine the Synthesizer Generator™ – GrammaTech’s language-sensitive editor generating toolkit – and Refactoring – a methodology for systematically transforming code to improve its design. The underlying machinery will be language independent, but in order to have focus in Phase I GrammaTech will concentrate on the translation of Ada to Java.