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A software company has a portfolio of products in the retail market
segment.
A US Local Government agency has a legacy IBM COBOL Application with proprietary extensions. The agency was looking to modernize the system in order to bring the system up-to-date with new technology and reduce maintenance costs. The agency had standardized on Java language for all new development.
Migration of the Legacy COBOL application to Java was seen as an essential part of a much larger picture of modernization activities – with the following benefits:
- Migration of existing application will not result in changes in Business Processes
- The system can continue to be maintained by existing personnel
- Moving from Proprietary to Open system
- Service Oriented Architecture
- Reduce Maintenance costs
- Easier integration of the Legacy Application with the more recent Java developments
SoftwareMining CORECT Translation Toolkit was used for translation of a total of 5 Million lines of code in phase-1 of the project. The project was implemented by Revenue Solutions Inc. The translated application is used by 250 con-current users.
Once the new code was tested and base-lined, a 2nd iteration was started with the following objectives:
- Re-design of all screens
- Application of Service Oriented Architecture to the new system
- Functional enhancement
The project was successfully completed and delivered in 15 months using 8 Java developers to perform iteration-1 (Translation, Compilation, Build) and Iteration-2 (SOA architecture, re-design of screens, integration with older parts of system).
A manual migration of the project was estimated to take some 20 times longer, and to be more expensive.
The back-office applications of one of the top 4 Canadian banks were implemented in COBOL / DB2 from the 1990’s. The applications were primarily batch applications, and updated frequently to reflect the banks changing business requirements. The applications and the associated DB2 was one of the last applications still running on the IBM Mainframe.
These back-office applications meet the business requirements of the bank. There has been a large investment in creating and updating them.
Issues
- The applications and the associated DB2 was one of the last applications still running on the IBM Mainframe. There were cost benefits associated with moving away from the mainframe.
- The application generates reports and data-files used by other COBOL applications in other departments, as well as other mainframes (UNISYS). Maintaining backward compatibility and maintaining a gradual modernization path is essential.
- The bank is standardizing on Java as the development language. Re-hosting of COBOL applications are not considered to be a long term solution.
- The limited resources and budget rules out manual rewrite
Solution:
Migration to Java addressed these issues by Automatic Translation of the COBOL applications to Java.
- SoftwareMining provided a Translation Service, allowing the bank’s resources to concentrate on test, maintenance and enhancement of the new application. During the translation process, all further updates to the COBOL programs were rapidly re-translated by SoftwareMining.
- Bank’s Java development staff were brought in from other projects for build, maintenance, and deployment, and also to run new applications against existing data in the DB2 databases and generate the new reports.
- Legacy development staff - the COBOL development staff already had good exposure to Java. The COBOL staff also generated reports and data-files from the COBOL application for testing purposes. Comparison of the data-files generated by COBOL and the new Java application provided an easy way to validate the new application.
- Financial Benefits - Some 150-200 programs per man year are tested and moved into production. (compared with approximately 10/15 programs for manual re-writing).
- Next Step – An additional department within the bank will shortly be using SoftwareMining services for migration of their COBOL applications.
Client Focus
Migration to Java addressed these issues by Automatic Translation of the COBOL applications to Java.
- Enhancements and Future Maintenance The bank’s selection of SoftwareMining solutions was after careful evaluation of the various suppliers, including the manual rewrite option. It was decided that the code produced by SoftwareMining’s Translation Tools offered the most legible and easy to maintain code. SoftwareMining Tools were customized to export all Embedded SQL statements to file system. This allows migration and testing of the SQL statements without having to touch any of the tested Java code.
- Performance Although COBOL applications tend to have better performance than the translated Java applications, Java allows running different batch programs on a lower cost machines with more processors. Some coding clean-up on the new Java applications resulted in better performance and some long running batch programs have to be split. Finally, a big proportion of the processing was performance.
Software Mining's CORECT tool can provide detailed documentation from the
structure of the code thus enabling the comparison of the different systems.
Whist the comparison of functionality is a manual job - Software Mining can
help provide a better integration platform for the remaining systems via upgrading
them to the more current languages, industry standard 3rd party components (Oracle
Database, IBM or BEA Application Servers, Sun hardware, etc) .
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