Educational Testing Service (ETS) is the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization. Each year, they develop, administer,  and score more than 50 million tests, including the TOEFL®, TOEIC®, GRE®, and Praxis® tests, in more than 180 countries. This requires an enormous data management capability. ETS turned to TSRI to transform their ECT and Praxis applications and databases from IBM job control language (JCL) and COBOL Batch to modern Java SE 17 in a cloud-native optimized AWS environment. To do this, they used a spring boot-type application to implement web services invoked by Python. TSRI also converted the IBM DB2 database and VSAM sequential database files to a relational PostgreSQL database on AWS Aurora.

Customer: Educational Testing Service (ETS) Source & Target Language: IBM COBOL to Java SE 17 on AWS Lines of Code: 1,199,633 lines of COBOL and JCL Duration:  11 Months Services: Automated Code Transformation, Automated Refactoring, Integration and Testing Support, SonarQube Quality Refactoring, Code-Specific Adaptation, Database Migration, Transformation "To-Be" Blueprint®, Application "As-Is" Blueprint®, Code Warranty

Going to AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas? The TSRI team is. The magic number to remember for accelerating and assuring your software modernization projects is 846. That’s our booth at the event where you’ll find our team and hear about our advanced JANUS Studio^® solution to modernize your software applications to the AWS cloud.

DON'T GAMBLE WITH SOLUTIONS WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR CODE.
CONNECT WITH THE EXPERTS AT TSRI.

AWS Mainframe Migration Competency Partners

As a vetted and validated AWS Mainframe Migration Competency partner, TSRI provides rapid, low-risk software modernization for deployment on AWS.

Stop by to see how the TSRI team has strategically planned and executed hundreds of successful modernization projects. We’ll be ready to discuss the business and technical details of our modernization solution and answer questions about how TSRI transforms more than 35 different languages operating without code-freeze and business disruption in a graceful, step-wise manner.
 

GAIN A FAST ADVANTAGE

AWS ISV Accelerate Program Member

At the booth, you can get a head-start on launching projects from kick-off and execution to ongoing operations on the AWS cloud. Because TSRI has earned membership in the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, we offer prioritized access to the AWS co-sell support team to drive faster adoption of ISV solutions. That means our customers get access to valuable resources that provide guidance to achieve better results through collaboration with the powerful AWS Sales and Account Management organizations.

YOU'VE GOT QUESTIONS

We've got over 250 successful migrations to reference

We speak from experience. TSRI has transformed some of the most secure and mission-critical military, government, and finance systems in the world to full business operations in cloud-ready modern languages. Our team at AWS re:Invent would love to share insights from real-world case studies across a broad range of industries.

— Ask us how we saved Pitney Bowes 97% on their annual Total Cost of Ownership by moving them—without disruption—from COBOL on an HP NonStop Tandem mainframe to a modern C# .NET Core application in production on AWS.

— You might also want to know how it only took six weeks to move the Canada Revenue Agency’s Help Desk application to AWS—while reducing their annual system maintenance costs by 80%.

— While you’re there, find out how we achieved a 99.9996% automation rate in modernizing all but one or two lines of code while transforming Educational Testing Services (ETS) from COBOL and JCL to Java and Python on AWS. That included a high-transaction batch system, DB2 and VSAM to PostgreSQL, as well as a very large number and variety of sort cards that required automation. We would love to tell you how we did it—and show you what we can do for you!

STOP BY BOOTH #846 OR PRE-SCHEDULE YOUR VISIT NOW

We love talking about this stuff. That’s partly why we love AWS re:Invent so much. It’s our chance to meet you face-to-face.

Our team of experts will be available to answer questions about your specific application modernization scenario, provide demonstrations, and share case studies of TSRI’s successful modernization projects spanning government, military, finance, insurance, retail, and many other industries. To get expert one-on-one modernization advice at AWS re:Invent put yourself on our calendar now.

Schedule a Session

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Proven by Decades of Results. Prove It for Yourself. 
For decades, TSRI clients have been discovering a dramatically faster, more accurate, and less expensive AI-based and automated modernization process. We’ve earned a place as the go-to resource for enterprise corporations, government, military, healthcare, and more. Now prove it for yourself. Find out how the proprietary TSRI modernization process delivers future-ready, cloud-based code in any modern language in a fraction of the time. 

See Case Studies 
Learn About Our Technology 
Get Started on Your Modernization Journey Today! 

In stark contrast to its 2021 numbers, the US Federal Government expects to end this fiscal year (2022) with a surplus of $308 billion dollars according to the Congressional Budget Office. (As opposed to last year’s $226 billion deficit.) While that excess fuels clickable headlines for politicians, it’s not great news if your agency or department uses less budget than you predicted—while possibly falling short of longer term goals such as software modernization.

“Use it, or lose it” is a real thing that has caused Federal Government agencies and departments to lose or cut over $127 billion between 2009 and 2019. In one stark example from 2019, the Department of Defense had to return $80 billion in unused budget.

The average amount of budget fund cancelation is about 1.6% annually.”

According to the Government Accountability Office, the average amount of budget fund cancelation is about 1.6% annually. While that number doesn’t sound large, it can have an erosive effect on your budget and create a downward trend that can be more difficult to reverse down the road when increases could be genuinely needed. And while the examples above are government figures, the principle is the same in the private sector—or even more tightly policed.

So, what can you do as we near the end of your fiscal year if you find yourself with that ugly surplus—even of a measly one or two percent or less? We’ve got four suggestions for you:

1. NOTCH YOUR ARROWS FOR NEXT YEAR

Take some time to cast ahead to your fiscal 2023 strategy. What updates and improvements would you like to see by the end of next year?

Knowing that you have money in your coffers ahead of time, consider what additional resources, technology, or assistance will help you achieve those goals. Are there moderate investments such as modernization planning that you can make this year that could give you wiggle room should the vagaries of budget and crisis change your situation next year? Are there plans you’d like to lock in now?

As you envision what next year should look like, consider software modernization. One smart use of funds ahead of a modernization project is using the final couple of months of this year to get an assessment for your program. It only took TSRI six weeks to assess the entire AT&T billing system with 961,780 lines of code and comments through our JANUS Studio^®, delivering an Application Blueprint^® that enabled them to begin the next phases of their modernization more efficiently.

It only took TSRI six weeks to assess the entire AT&T billing system with 961,780 lines of code.”

2. UPSKILL YOUR TEAM

Professional development does more than grow your organizational toolkit of capabilities; it also helps employee retention during a time of 3.5% unemployment.

In a fascinating 2022 learning and development study, LinkedIn found that the #1 driver of workplace culture (and so, retention) is opportunities to learn and grow. And in a time where languages like COBOL and Ada don’t even rank in the top ten searched languages, training in modern languages can also pay off for your organization. In a Microsoft-sponsored study, IDC found that IT professionals who have achieved a relevant role-based technical certification perform on average 26% better than their uncertified colleagues with the same responsibilities. Certifying your people is worth the investment.

3. UPGRADE YOUR TECHNOLOGY

If you have money left over, it’s a great time to provide your teams with technology that matches both the needs of a more mobile, more connected, and more secure world.

These can be affordable, pointed investments that can pay off with increased productivity, security, and employee satisfaction while positioning your teams to face changing needs. As you consider your options, think in terms of:

Mobility: More powerful and secure laptops and tablets

Business processes: Point of sale for retail, connected medical devices

Cloud computing: New as-a-Service applications, storage devices, and subscriptions

Cybersecurity: Assess and upgrade your current measures

Automation: Software, AI, and services to automate large, repetitive, or formerly impossible tasks

Let’s talk about that last one.

4. GET A FIRM HANDLE ON YOUR CURRENT CODE

Even if you’re not planning on modernizing code, poorly written or undocumented applications that are written in hard-to-understand languages can be a huge IT operating expense for you.

A Harris poll found that developers spend an average of 17 hours a week (42% of their time) dealing with bad code. Basic understanding of code content should be a prerequisite for any software-managing organization: know what’s there. But with millions, or tens of millions of lines of code, that can be very difficult or impossible to do manually.

Developers spend an average of 17 hours a week (42% of their time) dealing with bad code.”

That’s where TSRI DocsRev makes a powerful investment in all 365 days of 2023—and beyond.

DocsRev is automated code documentation-as-a-Service. It allows users with varying experience levels to quickly familiarize themselves with the structure and flow of the application through easily navigable diagrams, hyperlinking code, and other UML artifacts and graphics. It’s powered by the same automated tools our clients have trusted to document the world’s most critical applications since 1995. Now our technology is available to you as a simply-priced and easy-to-manage service that keeps you up to date on what’s really in your code.

In addition to giving you always-current code documentation, DocsRev apprises you on your application's current complexity, structure, control flow, data flow, similarity, and dead code. All you need to do is upload your latest code baseline to receive complete and detailed documentation. 

Trusted by major organizations around the world for application maintenance and development, DocsRev frees you from uncertainty by letting you easily inspect and identify external calls, utilities, and interfaces. DocsRev shows you what your code is actually up to by automatically exposing EXEC statements your application is using such as SQL, CICS, and more.

Let’s Make Your 2023 Budget Process Go Smoothly

Throughout next year and beyond, your code will change based on your needs. To make sure you have the right views into whatever happens in your code, the DocsRev team is continually adding new views, graphs, indices, diagrams, and other features to its documentation set.

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Proven by Decades of Results. Prove It for Yourself. 
For decades, TSRI clients have been discovering a dramatically faster, more accurate, and less expensive AI-based and automated modernization process. We’ve earned a place as the go-to resource for enterprise corporations, government, military, healthcare, and more. Now prove it for yourself. Find out how the proprietary TSRI modernization process delivers future-ready, cloud-based code in any modern language in a fraction of the time. 

See Case Studies 
Learn About Our Technology 
Get Started on Your Modernization Journey Today! 

CRA and AWS engaged with TSRI to complete the modernization of their COBOL-based system to Java on AWS. To Achieve CRA's goals, TSRI tuned JANUS Studio® to parse, transform, document, and refactor the IBM z/OS COBOL application. In just 1.5 months, TSRI modernized the application from an IBM Mainframe COBOL and CICS monolith to a modern multi-tier architecture in Java on the AWS cloud. Just as important, TSRI also converted the DB2 database and VSAM sequential files to a relational PostgreSQL database on AWS Aurora.

Customer: Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and AWS Source & Target Language: IBM COBOL to Java on AWS Lines of Code: 168,000 Duration:  1.5 Months Services: Automated Code Transformation, Automated Refactoring, Integration and Testing Support, SonarQube Quality Refactoring, Code-Specific Adaptation, Database Migration, Transformation "To-Be" Blueprint®, Application "As-Is" Blueprint®

The Pitney Bowes Postage Payment Application had been running COBOL for decades on an HP NonStop Tandem mainframe, however, to seize the opportunities of the digital cloud age and to reduce overall technical debt, Pitney Bowes needed to modernize the Tandem COBOL to C# .NET Core. Just as important as the code, the HP NonStop Tandem database needed to also be migrated to a modern Microsoft SQL Server database and deployed to AWS. TSRI successfully transformed the application at 99.96% automation, and deployed the modernized application on the AWS cloud.

Customer: Pitney Bowes Inc. Source & Target Language: COBOL to C# .Net Core on AWS Lines of Code: 390,000 Duration: 6 Months   Services:  Automated Code Transformation (99.96% level of automation), Automated Refactoring, Database Conversion: File based system to a Microsoft SQL Environment, Integration and Testing Support, Transformation Blueprint®, Application "As-Is" Blueprint®,

How long would it take you to complete 25,000 tasks that take thirty minutes each?

Before you drag out your calculator, that’s 12,500 hours, or about 1,562 working days. Wouldn’t it be better to have it all done in under an hour? That gives you an idea of how refactoring—when done correctly—can accelerate modernization process and deliver accuracy in the range of just one error among 20,000 lines of code. That’s the kind of accuracy that’s needed for critical systems. Let’s talk about how refactoring achieves it so fast.

The refactoring phase of modernization at TSRI takes a project beyond updating the code and database to modern standards and system architecture. Sure, the planning, assessment, transformation, and integration phases of a modernization process get the mass of the work done. But more is needed. Imagine if a great painter only took a portrait to the point of getting the features in the right places. For functional equivalency, high performance, and future-readiness you need to dive into the details to get them as right as the original—and ready for future enhancements and needs.

That’s where refactoring can be hugely beneficial. If, after the transformation and integration phases you have to find and address each issue manually over hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code, you may as well add those 12,500 or more hours back in. That’s why refactoring is key. By including an iterative code scanning and refactoring phase to the modernization process, TSRI automatically and semi-automatically remedies a host of issues at scale that would make developers run for the hills, including:

• Pinpointing and getting rid of dead or non-functional code
• Merging and consolidating duplicate code and data
• Improving design of code and data
• Eliminating system flaws from transformed software
   

"TSRI's refactoring process creates reusable components that can be applied to future projects"

And beyond those cleaning and refining functions, a well-designed refactoring process also provides forward-looking advantages. TSRI’s refactoring process improves maintainability, remediates security vulnerabilities, increases performance, and modularizes functionality. It also creates reusable components that can be applied to future projects for optimization, packaging, and redistribution.

When you’re able to reuse some or all of the outputs of automated or semi-automated refactoring, you don’t have to recreate the mechanisms for modern microservices, REST calls, and other reusable elements. They’re at your fingertips and ready for integration in modern environments or databases for future projects. It gives you the best of modularity, but customized and created specifically for your systems’ needs such as data-dictionaries, code and record consolidation, introduction of logging or comments, and more.

"It gives you the best of modularity, but customized and created specifically for your systems' needs."

One scan, one rule, and thousands of fixes

A key part of the refactoring process is scanning the newly modernized code to find issues for remediation. To do this, we use the SonarQube scanning tool. SonarQube is an open-source platform that executes continuous inspection of code quality in modernized code. It provides a detailed report of bugs, code smells, vulnerabilities, code duplications, and more. Once SonarQube has identified problems in the code the TSRI team can use the results to resolve the issues and improve code maintainability issues and security vulnerabilities.

This is where the economy of rules comes in. Once SonarQube has pointed out issues across thousands of lines of code, TSRI uses that intel to identify the types of issues that need to be addressed. When an issue appears once in an application, it often appears hundreds or thousands of times, and a single rule applied across all code can eliminate a host of individual instances.

So how did we get to those 12,500 hours we started with? We didn’t just make it up. In a TSRI project for Deutsche Bank, a single rule created based on a scan of the code fixed about 25,000 instances that issue. SonarQube estimated it would take 30 minutes to fix each instance. That means refactoring automated the remediation process and saved them about 12,500 hours of software development time. That’s a lot of Marks.

The proof is in the work. Refactoring can not only save thousands of coder hours, but a combination of code scanning and refactoring can also uplevel your modernization with:

• Maintainability making it easier to update and manage code going forward
• Readability for modern developers to find and improve the functions they need more easily
• Security by increasing the speed with which security issues can be found and remediated either manually or through refactoring rules
• Performance greatly increasing the efficiency of the application—for instance, enabling multiple services to run in parallel rather than sequentially.

Find out what refactoring done right can do for you, contact TSRI now

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Proven by decades of results. Prove it for yourself.
For decades, TSRI clients have been discovering a dramatically faster, more accurate, and less expensive AI-based and automated modernization process. We’ve earned a place as the go-to resource for enterprise corporations, government, military, healthcare, and more. Now prove it for yourself. Find out how the proprietary TSRI modernization process delivers future-ready, cloud-based code in any modern language in a fraction of the time.

See Case Studies 
Learn About Our Technology 
Get Started on Your Modernization Journey Today! 

Shaw Cable Systems, one of TSRI's Candian customers, engaged TSRI to modernize their CBS system, which involved 772,684 lines of VMS VAX BASIC source code and 275,707 of VAX Basic comments.  The system modernization called for code conversion to C#, along with other services. 

Customer: Shaw Cable System Source & Target Language: VMS VAX BASIC to C# Lines of Code: 1.1 Million Duration:  5 months Services: Automated Code Transformation, Automated Refactoring, Separation of the business and data logic into tiers, Integration and Testing Support,  Engineering Support, Transformation Blueprint®

The Oregon's Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS) serves approximately 300,000 employee members, inactive members and retirees from more than 850 public employers. OPERS required a major maintenance action of the OPERS Benefit Estimation Subsystem (BESS) and Benefit Calculation Subsystem (BCSS) to address changes in Oregon State retirement regulations. TSRI's automated refactoring capability was used to consolidate the applications and remove dead and redundant code.

Customer: State of Oregon Public Employees Retirement System     Source & Target Language: COBOL Refactoring Lines of Code: 250,000 Duration: 4 Months   Services:  JANUS Studio® Automated Refactoring, Testing and Implementation Support, Application Blueprint®

Sempra Energy needed to move their Microgrid Control System (MCS) application into a more contemporary environment. The challenge that TSRI and mLogica faced was transforming Sempra Energy's existing Sybase OpenServer platform into a more modern .NET/MS-SQL server environment under strict budget and schedule constraints. The project, which included the modernization, documentation, refactoring, testing, and integration of the application, was successfully concluded on-time and within budget constraints.

Customer: Sempra Energy & mLogica Source & Target Language: C to MS-SQL/C Lines of Code: 211,000 Duration: 4 Months Services: Automated Code Transformation, Automated Refactoring, Round-tripping, Unit Testing, Third Party Code Quality Refactoring, Integration and Testing Support, Transformation Blueprint®, Application Blueprint®