Deutsche Bank's relatively reliable mainframe infrastructure utilized COBOL and JCL languages running DB2 and VSAM flat-file databases for a variety of their key financial applications. The company’s leadership knew they would need to be cloud-enabled with a modern architecture to stay relevant for its customers and ongoing market needs. Following a successful proof of concept against other well-known industry soluitons, TSRI emerged as the best solution (highest quality output and most advanced architecture) for the full modernization effort of Deutsche Bank’s internal KreditManager application. An application which gives the company’s employees all of the tools they need to handle all of the company’s loan, credit and mortgage applications.
Using money from the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) under the Modernizing Government Technology Act disbursed by the General Services Administration (GSA) of the U.S. government, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sought to modernize several of its remaining critical systems on a legacy Unisys mainframe written in COBOL with a flat-file DMS-II database.
Customer: Department of Housing and Urban Development and Salient CRGT
How do you transform the slow pace of technological innovation within a federal agency into an opportunity for innovation and IT systems modernization? Start by taking a cue from the partnership between TSRI and GovCIO. With backing from the Federal Government’s Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) our joint teams propelled the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) from an outdated twentieth-century Unisys COBOL system into modern, service-oriented Java that was performant and functionally equivalent.
TSRI worked with GovGIO on their process designed to successfully migrate the applications to the Microsoft Azure cloud. They started by defining the five key project goals and taking an inventory of system components, including intersecting platforms. Once we had identified what the unique technical challenges were and how to address each, we created testing strategies and migrated the data stores for each system. Finally, we executed an automated code conversion and refactored the legacy COBOL code.
TSRI’s partnership with GovCIO executed a rapid, holistic mainframe migration process for HUD that has improved their organizational performance while minimizing risk. On day one after the productions systems were switched over from the Unisys mainframe to the Microsoft Azure cloud, the new system supported 25,356 users and 299,715 transactions with only three user problems reported. These are the HUD systems that manage, store, and protect all the personal financial and employment-related eligibility information for FHA insured financing. Given the criticality of the data managed every day by HUD, it was important that the migration run without impact on operations. The result could be seen in the first 30 days during which the new system disbursed just over $2.7 billion dollars in HUD program funds without a single error.
Review the details of how TSRI and GovCIO successfully executed this complex modernization project in our recently published case study.
The 9 Low-Risk Steps That Led to Success
You might be surprised that HUD and other government agencies still run their IT on mainframes using COBOL (first released in the 1950’s), or MUMPS (from the 1970’s). Running on these aging platforms presents an extensive list of challenges to these agencies: data management, growing storage, collaboration, security, etc. The modernization process typically involves risk, time, and significant expense. It’s understandable that a large agency like HUD would want to select a partner they knew could deliver a low-risk, high-accuracy result.
Working together, we adhered to GovCIO’s nine-step best-practices process that resulted in modernizing systems to modern cloud architectures that can now evolve with HUD, while preventing negative impacts to their mission, day-to-day operations, and security.
A first-person account of HUD’s modernization process with Roger Knapp – Executive Vice President and HUD Program Manager
Only a few engineers know what it feels like to lead a major government agency through an automated mainframe modernization. Roger Knapp is one of them and has been working in the field for over 30 years. As Executive VP of Engineering & Service Delivery at TSRI, Roger has unique insights on the HUD project. He sat down to share them in an interview with GovCIO as part of their Partner Spotlight.
In a short chat, he shares how the TSRI-GovCIO team overcame the challenges not only of modernizing a nationally mission-critical system at risk of obsolescence, but also how to deal with the presence of dynamic SQL data in the legacy application logic.
Get the story straight from Roger in his interview with GovCIO.
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.
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.
No change in business logic.
Reduction in overhead costs.
Continuous development during and after migration.
These are a few modernization concepts that Scott Pickett, TSRI’s Vice President of Product Operations and Service Delivery, discussed on his recent appearance on Amazon Web Services’ APN TV channel.
“TSRI allows for an ability to do automated transformation of not only your language, but your application to the cloud environment, allowing you to bring in skilled, modern technology to your legacy implementations, being able to drive down the cost point associated with ongoing operational costs, and being able to deliver new applications, new functionality, new screens, and new capabilities in that modern language,” he said in his talk.
So what does that mean, exactly?
In TSRI’s modernization of a major European bank to the cloud, that meant they modernized approximately 80,000 lines of code at 99.7% automation. In other words, only 384 of those lines of code were hand-written. That's big for a project of this size—but it's huge when you're talking about applications with hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code!
For any organization, whether in commercial enterprise organizations like the banking client mentioned above, or in government agencies, modernization reduces risk.
“You're able to bring a new skill set, new experts that know Java and know CI and CD tools and apply them to your legacy application that's been modernized,” Scott said. “It literally also allows for the ability to drop tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of dollars, off your monthly costs.”
As Scott also noted in his presentation, “we can not only transform code quickly…because there are very, very few manual changes, but it also means that you can migrate to the cloud and then be able to not have any business logic change associated with that migration.”
Maintaining business logic is a big deal when it comes to systems that measure their age in decades rather than years and the original programmers have long since moved on.
One other interesting point Scott brought up is how TSRI’s tools have enabled customers to maintain agility and competitive advantage by providing its clients with the modern, cloud-based applications they need—all while reaching back to its legacy DB2 database that supports the applications that have yet to be modernized.
Throughout the talk, Scott also pointed to how TSRI has adopted a step-wise model, which modernizes small applications or pieces of an application, tests for validity, then pushes into production before the next applications are transformed. Such a methodology allows the client to continue to develop in the legacy language, maintain a common data set, and minimizes business disruption to almost zero.
“There’s no big delay. You can continue developing the legacy and we can migrate those legacy applications while the transformations are happening and migrate them into your modern environment,” he said.
Scott also explains the steps of an automated migration in layman’s terms and how a TSRI transformation integrates cleanly into cloud services like AWS using containerization and microservices.
We of course don’t want to spoil the presentation by giving everything away, so head over to APN TV and watch for yourself to learn about how automated modernization to the cloud will save your organization time, money, and the headaches from continuing to maintain legacy systems.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
"The Software Revolution, Inc. To Participate In The U.S. Air Force's Software Technology Conference"
Kirkland, WA. (March 7, 2002) – The Software Revolution, Inc. (TSRI) will be a major participant at the upcoming Air Force-sponsored Software Technology Conference (STC) in Salt Lake City, Utah scheduled for 29 April to 2 May 2002. Located in Booth 927 of the Exhibition Hall, the senior staff of TSRI will be available throughout the week to answer questions and provide in-depth demonstrations of the eVolution 2000 TM toolset.
For those attending this important conference, it will be an excellent opportunity for a first-hand view of TSRI's automated legacy system modernization technology that is sweeping the logistics and maintenance, and operational communities within the Air Force. TSRI will be providing real-time transformation demonstrations of the Jovial, Fortran, Cobol, Assembler, Ada, and CMS2 languages into C++. It will also be an opportunity to learn about the range of contract vehicles now available to TSRI for quickly and efficiently providing support to the Air Force
eVolution 2000™ toolset
The foundation of TSRI's capabilities is the eVolution 2000™ tool-set. Through the application of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technologies, TSRI has developed a highly automated capability (99%+) to assess, transform, re-factor, and if desired web-enable, a wide variety of application source languages, along with their associated databases. TSRI can transform Cobol, Jovial, C, Fortran, Assembler, Ada, and CMS2 into modern, platform-independent C++, JAVA, or XML (eXtended Markup Language) with CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) compatibility.
Using eVolution 2000™, TSRI can carry out sophisticated legacy software modernization in a fraction of the time and budget associated with alternative approaches. More importantly, TSRI reduces the technical and schedule risk associated with legacy system modernization by generating modernized applications and data that are fully documented and guaranteed accurate functional equivalents of the original legacy system.
For more information about TSRI, visit our web site or contact:
TSRI
Greg Tadlock
Vice President of Sales
Phone: (425) 284-2770
Fax: (425) 284-2785 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
"New Book by Ulrich and Newcomb: Information Systems Transformation:
Architecture-Driven Modernization Case Studies with
Reviews by Grady Booch, Ed Yourdon and Richard Soley"
Kirkland, WA. (Feburary 22, 2010) – Book Release Information Systems Transformation: Architecture-Driven Modernization Case Studies
By William M. Ulrich and Philip H. Newcomb
Published by Morgan Kaufmann
ISBN: 978-0-12-374913-0
Copyright Feb 2010
$59.95 USD €43.95 EUR £29.99 GBP
According to Grady Booch, IBM Fellow & Chief Scientist, Software Engineering:
"Ulrich and Newcomb's book offers a comprehensive examination of the challenges of growing software-intensive systems … (Read more...)
According to Ed Yourdon, noted Author and Consultant:
"Modernization is going to be a more and more important part of the overall IT strategy. William Ulrich and Philip Newcomb's important new book ... (Read more...)
According to Richard Soley Ph.D. Chairman/CEO, Object Management Group (OMG):
“Estimates by internationally-known researchers of the worldwide legacy code base is now approaching a half-trillion lines. That only counts so-called "legacy languages" like COBOL--which drive the world. Add in database schemas … (Read more...)
About the Book
Information Systems Transformation: Architecture-Driven Modernization Case Studies, a new book by William Ulrich and Philip Newcomb, provides a practical guide to organizations seeking ways to understand and modernize existing systems as part of their information management strategies. It includes an introduction to ADM disciplines and standards, including alignment with business architecture, as well as a series of scenarios outlining how ADM is applied to various initiatives. Ten chapters, containing in-depth, modernization case studies, distill the theory and delineate principles, processes, and best practices for every industry, ensuring the book's leading position as a reference text for all of those organizations relying on complex software systems to maintain their economic, competitive and operational viability. (Read more...)
Key Features
Acts as a one-stop shopping reference and complete guide for implementing various modernization models including core concepts, common scenarios, and a guide for getting started.
Concepts are illustrated with real-life examples from various modernization projects, allowing you to immediately apply tested solutions and see results.
Ten chapters containing in-depth modernization case studies, covering multiple platforms, industries and government agencies from four different countries.
About the Authors
William M. Ulrich is President of Tactical Strategy Group, Inc. (TSGI) and a management consultant. Mr. Ulrich has been in the modernization field since 1980 and continues to serve as a strategic advisor on business and IT transformation projects for corporations and government agencies. In 2005, Mr. Ulrich was awarded the Keeping America Strong Award for his work in information systems modernization. He is Co-Chair of the OMG Architecture-Driven Modernization Task Force and the OMG Business Architecture Special Interest Group, Editorial Director of the Business Architecture Institute, and author of Legacy Systems: Transformation Strategies.
Philip H. Newcomb is Founder and CEO of The Software Revolution, Incorporated (TSRI) and creator of TSRI's acclaimed architecture-driven modernization services and toolset JANUS Studio®. He is coauthor of Reverse Engineering (Kluwer 1996) with Linda Wills, Coeditor of the 2nd Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (IEEE 1995) with Elliot Chikofsky and principal author of the Abstract Syntax Tree Metamodeling Specification (OMG Specification 2009). With more than 35 publications and 70 successfully completed information system modernization projects he is a recognized leader in the application of artificial intelligence, automatic programming and formal methods to industrial-scale software modernization.
About Morgan Kaufmann:
Since 1984, Morgan Kaufmann has published premier content on information technology, computer architecture, data management, computer networking, computer systems, human computer interaction, computer graphics, multimedia information and systems, artificial intelligence, computer security, and software engineering. Our audience includes the research and development communities, information technology (IS/IT) managers, and students in professional degree programs. Learn more at www.mkp.com. Contact Bob Dodd, 781-313-4726 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., for an electronic review copy, access to our expert authors, or to publish excerpts of our material.
For more information about TSRI contact:
TSRI
Greg Tadlock
Vice President of Sales
Phone: (425) 284-2770
Fax: (425) 284-2785 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Kirkland, WA. (March 12, 2010) – One of the best kept secrets in Washington DC is that our nation’s veterans already have a comprehensive electronic health care record (EHR) that for decades has supported delivery of quality health care at more than a 160 VHA hospitals around the world. That extraordinary system is VistA, the Veteran Information System Technical Architecture. Written in MUMPS, VistA serves as the vital backbone of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Electronic Health Care Record System (EHRS) that manages medical record data and delivers medical informatics to the veteran’s bedside while tracking and managing 100% of veteran’s health care electronically throughout his journey through the VHA medical care system.
Ironically, VistA like many systems that are highly successful, is now threatened with self-extinction due to its need for continuous growth and the inability of MUMPS, the language it is written in, to sustain its continued evolution. VistA suffers from a form of software arthritis common among many legacy systems. Due to its age, size and complexity VistA is brittle, inflexible and resistant to change, and its maintenance costs have gone through the roof, compromising the VHA’s ability to grow and evolve Vista as the foundation for a 21st century medical delivery system for its veterans.
In 2005 the VHA estimated automated modernization of VistA could save the VHA upwards of $3 Billion compared to redevelopment, or manual replacement. With the announcement today by The Software Revolution, Inc (TSRI), (the world-leading supplier of architecture driven modernization (ADM-based) solutions), of its open-source Transformation Blueprint® for OpenVistA, TSRI has made a huge start on this daunting challenge. For those who might care to understand, the OpenVistA Transformation Blueprint® is a major step towards achievement of the VHA's goal of modernizing its Electronic Healthcare Record system for its veterans.
TSRI’s OpenVistA®Transformation Blueprint® provides the complete target Java code and UML design for the transformation of all 2.1 Million lines of OpenVistA® and 120,000+ lines of Fileman MUMPS code. The OpenVistA®Transformation Blueprint® is far more than a mere language translation. It is a massive multi-million page (300GB) web-based software design and architecture document consisting of navigable hypertext of the 'As-Is' MUMPS and 'To-Be Java' hyperlinked to hundreds of thousands of State Machine Graphs, Cause-Effect Graphs, State-Transition Tables, Control Flow Graphs, Data-Flow Graphs, Structure Charts, Data Element Tables, Class Diagrams expressed as scalable graphical diagrams that richly document all of the MUMPS and target Java/J2EE code. The Transformation Blueprint® is both an application portfolio as well as a complete architectural roadmap towards a modernized OpenVistA® and Fileman. Every statement of MUMPS in OpenVistA® is shown side-by-side with its transformation into Java/ J2EE along with an extensive array of software property-oriented metric indices (e.g. fan-in, fan-out, complexity, redundancy, dead code, etc) for navigation to the code measured by the property.
To learn more about TSRI’s transformation of OpenVistA® and the company’s plans for evolving OpenVistA® towards a modernized universal EHR system of the future, read the Chapter 12 casestudy: Veterans Health Administration’s VistA MUMPS Modernization Pilot in William Ulrich and Philip Newcomb’s new book Information Systems Transformation: Architecture-Driven Modernization CaseStudies, just published by Morgan Kaufmann, February 2010 as part of the Object Management Group (OMG) OMG Series.
Kirkland, WA. (February 22, 2010) – New Book Release
Information Systems Transformation: Architecture-Driven Modernization Casestudies
By William M. Ulrich and Philip H. Newcomb
Published by Morgan Kaufmann
ISBN: 978-0-12-374913-0
Copyright Feb 2010
$59.95 USD €43.95 EUR £29.99 GBP www.informationsystemstransformation.com
For more information about TSRI contact:
TSRI
Greg Tadlock
Vice President of Sales
Phone: (425) 284-2770
Fax: (425) 284-2785 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.