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State Dept. Of Transportation and Auctor
A State’s Department of Transportation Is Moving Off the Mainframe with the Help of EvolveWare
“You can't move forward with application modernization initiatives without having a deep understanding of what you have first. Not only does EvolveWare’s Intellisys platform excel in the number of languages it consumes, the speed at which its able to process code and generate insights, and a user experience that is friendly for both technical and analyst personnel, but the EvolveWare team also provides great support and guidance as we work through these complex and increasingly urgent initiatives” – Project Lead/Analyst, Auctor
INDUSTRY
Government through a service provider
PLATFORM CAPABILITIES USED
Documentation & Analysis
SUCCESS METRIC
Generated documentation for 1.65MM LoC across multiple languages combined into a single repository in 5 months
The Story
State departments of transportation help facilitate industry operations, commerce, and community life by maintaining all major modes of transportation. Many are now facing a significant challenge to delivering their mission: upgrading the legacy systems that support critical business processes. Mainframes, which have been around since the 1960s, have been used to handle data processing and other administrative workloads. While highly reliable and long-lived, mainframes are also inflexible and expensive to maintain, which is why many IT leaders want to pivot to the cloud.
One state’s Department of Transportation has been working on this transformation journey for a few years now. They are currently seeking to adopt commercial off the shelf (COTS) solutions to replace some of their business process mainframe applications, which require updating interfaces and changing integrations. To do so, they needed to start by understanding their legacy applications.
The agency decided to start by focusing on a mainframe application that is currently used to support consumable inventory: recording equipment data such as maintenance costs and how systems are used. By modernizing these capabilities, the agency will be able to share data with partners and flexibly update business policies to keep pace with evolving requirements. To accomplish this goal, the agency turned to Auctor, an IT consultancy and longtime partner who works with a variety of best-in-breed solutions in order to achieve their client’s goals. Upon understanding the agency’s requirements for this project, Auctor decided to engage with EvolveWare and use their Intellisys platform for the initial phase.
Problems
- A lack of legacy programming talent: With only two part-time staff who understand legacy programming languages and maintain the agency’s mainframe, the agency lacked the bandwidth to tackle the project.
- An absence of technical application documentation: The agency has evolved its mainframe applications over time, with input from different contributors. This institutional knowledge, however, only resided with staff. They lacked up-to-date documentation of the source code that would enable leaders to fully understand the applications, key dependencies, database access and sharing details, etc.
- Need to understand systems across multiple legacy and modern languages: The agency was looking to understand applications and their dependencies written across 4 different programming languages including legacy languages such as COBOL as well as more modern languages such as C# .NET.
Solution
EvolveWare’s Intellisys platform was used to:
- Automate the creation of documentation artifacts for applications supporting equipment management and maintenance
- Provide detailed source code analysis and process dependencies across applications
- Set up a phased approach to modernization by starting with a deep understanding of the applications to then use for analysis and planning the initiative
Results
- Generated documentation for 1.65MM lines of code written in various programming languages, including COBOL (880K lines), C# .NET with T-SQL and PL/SQL (584K lines), and VB .NET (180K lines)
- The documentation artifacts generated by Intellisys revealed that there were missing files from the original source code files given, increasing both the scope and complexity of the modernization effort. At the beginning, the project was believed to span about one million lines of code, but it was determined to actually span 1.65MM lines.
- Built an enterprise level repository for all applications across programming languages in 5 months, enabling Auctor to search in just one repository for critical information and streamline their workflows
- Eliminated the need for support staff to understand how to navigate each development environment, facilitating collaboration amongst various project stakeholders
- Improved business continuity by reducing reliance on a shrinking pool of staff for legacy system insights
- Enabled continuous impact analysis capabilities and on-going maintenance for current code while waiting for next steps on modernization initiative
- Poised to use Intellisys to extract the business rules from the source application as the next step to moving towards the end COTS products
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