Automated Compliance & Regulatory Logic Preservation Workflow

Manual validation of business rules during a migration can stall go-live for months. This workflow automates the identification and tagging of regulatory logic (e.g., SOX controls, GDPR data handling, Basel III calculations) within legacy COBOL, ABAP, or RPG code. By generating a validated mapping report and test evidence, it provides auditors with a pre-packaged compliance dossier, slashing re-certification timelines from 6-9 months to 4-6 weeks and preventing costly project overruns.

Critical compliance rules are often buried in undocumented code or tribal knowledge. The workflow uses agents to parse code, comments, and configuration files, extracting decision logic into a structured, version-controlled rule catalog. Each rule is linked to its source code location and target service, creating an immutable audit trail. This prevents accidental dilution or omission of high-risk logic during refactoring, directly mitigating financial penalties and operational risk post-migration.

Certification requires proof that new services behave identically to legacy systems for regulated scenarios. The workflow automatically generates regulator-aligned test suites—including edge cases and exception paths—from the extracted logic. These tests run in CI/CD pipelines against both legacy stubs and newly generated microservices, providing continuous validation. This shifts compliance testing from a manual, post-build gate to an automated, continuous process, ensuring issues are caught during development, not during audit.

Manually tracing thousands of lines of code for compliance logic is a high-cost, error-prone bottleneck. The workflow deploys specialized parsing and classification agents that operate across the entire codebase, flagging potential regulatory functions, data flows, and control points. Analysts then review a prioritized, pre-analyzed list instead of raw code. This reduces manual code review effort by over 80%, freeing scarce compliance and business analysts for higher-value exception handling and architectural oversight.

Post-migration, compliance is not static. The workflow outputs are not just reports but integrated components: a rule catalog that plugs into a policy engine (e.g., OPA, Drools) and a change-impact analysis layer. When new regulations emerge or code changes, the system can automatically assess which services and rules are affected. This transforms compliance from a project-based cost center into an operational capability, reducing the cost and time of future regulatory adaptations by 50% or more.

The total cost of migration often underestimates soft costs like extended audit engagements and consultant-led rule discovery. This workflow provides hard metrics: lines of code analyzed, rules identified, test cases auto-generated, and analyst hours saved. By quantifying the avoided cost of manual compliance re-work and delayed time-to-market, it creates a compelling, defensible ROI model for the modernization business case, often justifying the entire automation investment within a single regulatory domain.

This agent parses legacy source code (COBOL, PL/SQL, RPG), configuration files, and comments using semantic search and pattern recognition to identify logic related to regulations like SOX, GDPR, or Basel III. It tags code blocks with metadata (regulation, rule ID, effective date) and creates a structured inventory. This automation replaces months of manual code review, directly reducing the risk of missing critical compliance controls during migration planning.

This component takes the tagged logic and generates human-readable business rule specifications and machine-readable artifacts (e.g., JSON schemas, OpenAPI specs, decision tables). It maps the legacy implementation to target architecture patterns (e.g., microservice, rules engine). This creates the single source of truth for developers, ensuring the translated service's functional requirements are explicitly tied to the original regulatory intent.

An automated test harness that generates equivalence tests by executing the original legacy logic and the newly generated service logic with the same inputs, comparing outputs for regulatory-critical fields. Discrepancies are flagged for human review. This provides continuous validation throughout the migration, creating a defensible audit trail that proves compliance logic was preserved.

The central workflow engine (e.g., built with LangGraph or Camunda) that coordinates the discovery, mapping, and validation agents. It enforces approval gates at key stages (e.g., sign-off on rule specifications), logs every decision and artifact change, and generates final compliance certification packages. This system integrates with enterprise GRC platforms like ServiceNow to operationalize governance.

For rules destined for externalization, this component automatically formats and deploys the validated logic to a target rules engine (e.g., Drools, IBM ODM) or compliance microservice. It handles the API contracts, versioning, and integration with the new application stack. This automation ensures the modernized system's architecture supports agile updates to compliance logic without code redeploys.

A critical control layer where ambiguous logic, failed equivalence tests, or low-confidence mappings are routed for analysis by compliance officers and subject matter experts. The queue integrates with collaboration tools (Slack, Teams) and provides context-rich dashboards. This ensures human oversight is focused only on high-risk exceptions, optimizing expert time and maintaining accountability.