Displaying items by tag: cobol

Using automation to modernize mainframe applications will bring a codebase to today’s common coding standards and architectures. But in many cases, modernization to an application’s functional equivalent isn’t always enough. Organizations can do more to make their modern code more efficient and readable. By building refactoring phases into their modernization projects, organizations can eliminate the Pandora’s box of dead or non-functional code that many developers don’t want to open, especially if it contains elements that just don’t work.

Using TSRI’s automated refactoring engine, remediation was complete in an hour.

What is Refactoring and How is it Used?

Refactoring, by definition, is an iterative process that automatically identifies and remediates pattern-based issues throughout a modernized application’s codebase. For example, unreferenced variables or unnecessary redundant snippets could exist throughout the application. This scan, known as dead/redundant code refactoring, will find repetitions of any of this unusable code to flag, then remove it from the codebase. One of TSRI’s current projects found 25,000 instances of a similar issue that would have required 15 minutes of manual remediation per instance—not including the inevitable introduction of human error that would require further remediation. The number of development hours would take more than a year for a single developer to complete.

Using TSRI’s automated refactoring engine, however, remediation was complete in an hour.

Calling refactoring its own post-modernization phase is, in some ways, misleading. Refactoring typically occurs all the way through an automated mainframe transformation. As an example, in a typical COBOL or PL/1 mainframe modernization, TSRI would refactor the code from a monolithic application to a multi-tier application, with Java or C# handling back-end logic, a relational database layer through a Database Access Object (DAO) layer, and the user interface (screens) modernized in a web-based format. Believe it or not, many legacy applications still run on 3270 green-screens or other terminals, like in the graphic below.

Once the automated modernization of the legacy application is complete, the application has become a functionally equivalent, like-for-like system. However, any deprecated code, functions that may have never worked as planned, or routines that were written but never implemented will still exist. A process written in perhaps 1981—or even 1961—may have taken far more code to execute than a simple microservice could handle today.

Situations like this are where refactoring becomes indispensable.

Where to begin?

Before a formal refactoring process can begin, it’s important to understand your goals and objectives, such as performance, quality, cybersecurity, and maintainability. This will typically mean multiple workshops to define which areas of the modernized codebase need attention and the best candidates for refactoring, based upon the defined goals. These refactorings will either be semi-automated (fully automated with some human input) or custom written (based upon feedback from code scanners or subject-matter experts.)

The refactoring workshops can reveal many different candidates for refactoring:

• Maintainability: By removing or remediating bugs, dead or orphaned code, or any other anomalies the codebase can be reduced by as much as one third while pointing developers in the direction of any bugs in need of remediation.
•  
• Readability: Renaming obscure functions or variables for a modern developer to fit within naming conventions that are both understandable and within the context of the code’s functionality.
•  
• Security: Third-party tools such as Fortify and CAST can be utilized to find vulnerabilities, but once found they need to be remediated through creation of refactoring rules.
•  
• Performance: Adding reusable microservices or RESTful endpoints to connect to other applications in the cloud can greatly improve the efficiency of the application, as can functionality that enables multiple services to run in parallel rather than sequentially.

What are the Challenges?

• Challenge 1: One reason refactoring must be an iterative process is that some functionality can change with each pass. Occasionally, those changes will introduce bugs to the application. However, each automated iteration will go though regression testing, then refactored again to remediate those bugs prior to the application returning to a production environment.
•  
• Challenge 2: The legacy architecture itself may pose challenges. On a mainframe, if a COBOL application needs to access data, it will call on the entire database and cycle through until it finds the records it needs. Within a mainframe architecture this can be done quickly. But if a cloud-based application needs to call a single data record out of millions or billions from halfway across the world (on cloud servers), the round trip of checking each record becomes far less efficient—and, in turn, slower. By refactoring the database, the calls can go directly to the relevant records and ignore everything else that exists in the database.
•  
• Challenge 3: Not every modernization and refactoring exercise meets an organization’s quality requirements. For example, the codebase for a platform that runs military defense systems is not just complex, it’s mission critical. Armed forces will set a minimum quality standard that any transformation must meet. Oftentimes these standards can only be achieved through refactoring. A third-party tool like SonarQube in conjunction with an automated toolset like TSRI’s JANUS Studio^® can be utilized to discover and point to solutions for refactoring to reach and exceed the required quality gate.
•  

In conclusion, while an automated modernization will quickly and accurately transform legacy mainframe applications to a modern, functionally equivalent, cloud-based or hybrid architecture, refactoring will make the application durable and reliable into the future.

--

TSRI is Here for You

As a leading provider of software modernization services, TSRI enables technology readiness for the cloud and other modern architecture environments. We bring software applications into the future quickly, accurately, and efficiently with low risk and minimal business disruption, accomplishing in months what would otherwise take years.

See Case Studies
Learn About Our Technology
Get started on your modernization journey today!

A $39 billion clothing retailer with 4,300 stores worldwide sought to modernize its suite of mainframe COBOL supply chain applications. These applications supported the client’s unique business process, which provided them with a major competitive advantage and fueled years of unprecedented growth. Today, the clients business logic was preserved and their services are hosted on Azure with data integration directly through service bus queues and scheduling handled via Logic Apps.

Customer: Retail Client Source & Target Language: COBOL to C# Lines of Code: 86,000 Duration:  3 months

One of the largest Japanese Car Manufactures now uses TSRI’s modernization methods to increase efficiency in their manufacturing systems. With the help of systems integrator Comture Corporation, TSRI was able to successfully transform 120k lines of COBOL to Java, in a three-week time-period, with over 99% automation levels. 

United States Air Force SBSS ILS-S COBOL to Java on AWS Modernization

A major component of the system is 54 years old, written in COBOL, and provides retail-level business logic. The component runs on mainframes that have proven to be extremely difficult to change and manage, and the DoD needed to modernize the component to drive down operating costs and move to an open platform, while retaining all functionality....

The U.S. Air Force uses the Integrated Logistics System – Supply (ILS-S), of which the Standard Base Supply System (SBSS) is a major part, as a mainstay of their supply chain. The SBSS program includes over 1.5 million lines of COBOL, as well as smaller numbers of C and Assembly, all of which are to be transformed into Java. 

Modernization of code demands a high degree of precision. It is absolutely critical that the reengineered software performs in the same manner as the original. This requires two things: a rigorous approach to code refactoring based upon tried principles which retain the underlying logic; and a well-planned and consistent program of testing to ensure that logic is preserved and improvements do not in any way alter the function of the code. Testing is vital. Companies need to be certain that their modernized critical software will perform according to exact the same rules as the original.

Enormous amounts of COBOL code have been created and relied upon for decades. It really is the bedrock of early computing. But now, ancient COBOL systems are challenged because the original assumptions under which the code was written are no longer valid. COBOL was designed as a robust business language to handle batch oriented database operations in an ACID environment. Today, these vital systems, including financial, security, transportation, and healthcare solutions continue to run. But access is changed, processing requirements have changed, and the availability of coders to understand, maintain, and augment the systems diminishes year-by-year.

The Reliability & Maintainability Information System (REMIS) is a key component of the Air Force Depot Maintenance System. Ten years after the successful modernization of REMIS in 2004, the US Air Force reached back out to TSRI to modernize the rest of the system as well as take the C++ we already produced to Java. The project was delivered on time and under budget by almost half a million dollars.