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| CORE Home > Our Company > E-Bulletin |
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Volume 1 Welcome to the first issue of our e-bulletin. Please feel free to forward it to your colleagues. |
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Migration Planning: Save Money and Time The cost and time required to modernize a legacy PowerHouse® application by building a new one from the ground up is often grossly underestimated. Why? Many times, critical steps in the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) are simply forgotten or misjudged. This month, we outline the steps required to properly initiate a migration project, and show you how CORE Migration's automated technology can save millions in development costs and dramatically shorten the time-to-market for the new application. The phases required to complete the migration (Testing and Implementation) will be covered in a future issue. Step 1: After establishing the goal of the project (i.e. modernize an existing application), a Requirements Analysis should be conducted. This involves an analysis of end-user information needs, and will refine the project goals into defined functions and operations of the intended application. This will ensure that all of the business rules for each of the system components that will be migrated are carried over into the new environment. While this step may seem tedious and time consuming, it is an effective and necessary step that minimizes the inherent risks associated with building a new mission critical application from the ground up. This phase of the project will document the relationships between business entities and/or functions by employing a variety of analytical tools, design methods and evaluative techniques to aid in decision-making. Step 2: During this phase of the project, you document all of the desired features and operations in detail, including screen layouts, business rules, process diagrams, pseudo-code and other documentation. Look for any commonalities between PowerHouse and the target language. How are declarations handled in both languages? Where is the user-interface code declared? Where is procedural code declared? How are the languages mapped to one another? After examining these issues you will then need to map the PowerHouse code (functions, verbs, keywords, etc.) to their equivalents in the new architecture, including creating many of the functions that do not have a direct mapping between PowerHouse and the target language. You will also need to build the inherent PowerHouse functionality that comprises the PowerHouse engine into the framework of the new architecture, as this is vital to the success of the migration. For example, PowerHouse applications contain an activities list on the screen statement that specifies the add, update, find and delete actions that are available on a particular screen. This will need to be built into the target language. Step 3: It is here that the coding of the application takes place. For those who do not follow a SDLC methodology, it is common practice to simply start coding. Without following the two previous steps, the likelihood of producing inefficient and hard to maintain code increases, and there is a much greater chance that some functionality will be missing. Forecasting the coding time required is a very subjective process, since developers work at different speeds and PowerHouse programs are highly varied in terms of size and complexity. To approximate a timeline, a developer who is familiar with PowerHouse and the target language must manually examine each PowerHouse screen, report, and batch process. How CORE Migration saves you time and money: CORE Migration is the proven method for moving mission critical core applications from PowerHouse to modern computing platforms. The CORE Migration method begins with the development of a migration scope and timeline. CORE Migration experts first perform an assessment of the PowerHouse code using an automated scientific method that ensures both precision and consistency in evaluating the scope and complexity of the application source code. The CORE Migration Assessment toolkit initially parses the entire application to identify any missing or orphaned files. Once it has been confirmed that the application is complete and that there are no missing files, the CORE Migration Assessment toolkit reads each source code module and the dictionary, and assigns a "metric point weighting". The metric point weighting is based on a function point methodology that dissects each individual piece of source code and assesses its scope and complexity. This process removes all of the subjectivity of a manual assessment, and enables CORE Migration to provide a fixed price and fixed timeline for each migration project. Next, CORE Migration's Design Preservation toolkit is used to automate the Define and Design phases of the SDLC. This automated approach dramatically reduces the timeline, while preserving the following key elements of the PowerHouse application: Once the business logic contained in the legacy application has been preserved, the CORE Migration Forward Engineering toolkit is then applied to the application to convert it to Java or .NET code. This toolkit generates on average 70-95% of the new source code automatically. A small amount of manual coding, or "clean up", is typically performed to account for the behavior and interaction of PowerHouse in the legacy environment and to move to the new web-based architecture. Some examples include infield validation, do externals, push verb, designer procedures, and operating system dependencies due to moving to a new hardware platform, etc. Each migrated application is delivered complete with a pre-built technical architecture, the Java or .NET code for the migrated PowerHouse programs, and the following components and associated class libraries: The following diagram compares the timelines of an SDLC migration to a CORE Migration, and assumes that the SDLC approach takes a total 500 days.  CORE Migration takes significantly less time to complete the Define and Design phases because our experts use the CORE Migration Design Preservation toolkit to automate an otherwise labor intensive process. To find out how you can dramatically reduce the time and expense required to modernize your legacy PowerHouse application, and for a free assessment of your PowerHouse migration project, please contact CORE Migration at (613) 727-5051 or sales@coremigration.com. VISaer soars with CORE Migration VISaer Inc. is a small but rapidly growing Boston-based software company. It develops and sells fully integrated computer systems that address the needs of companies operating in the aircraft maintenance, and equipment repair and overhaul (MRO) industry. Development of the VISaer application began almost twenty years ago using Cognos® PowerHouse®, a 4GL application development tool. Over the years, the application had become became very large, with over 4,000 modules, 2,500 screens, and 1,500 reports and processes. VISaer was finding it increasingly difficult to sell a character-based "blue-screen" application in a highly competitive market. In the past few years, other vendors, including SAP, had released web-based versions of their products. In order to remain in business and be competitive, VISaer had no choice but to modernize its core application. VISaer explored a number of alternatives including Cognos Axiant®, the forward path for PowerHouse, building a new application themselves, and using modern screen-scraping technologies. However, only CORE Migration was able to guarantee preservation of their existing functionality in a modern, Web architecture, provide sufficient support and knowledge transfer throughout the process, and deliver a solution in a short period of time. "We explored other alternatives, but chose CORE Migration because of its systematic and focused approach to migrating PowerHouse applications," said Geoffrey Andrew, CTO and VP of Product Development. "CORE Migration also offered the right technology. We wanted to preserve the original application, and quickly realized that CORE Migration's workbench of software tools provided the only automated approach that would allow us to avoid an otherwise labor-intensive process." CORE Migration and VISaer proceeded to migrate the legacy application to the Microsoft .NET framework using the Self Directed option. VISaer chose this model because it would give their development team intimate knowledge of the new application, while leveraging their knowledge of the functionality of the legacy program. In the fall of 2002, with the CORE migration completed, VISaer released Version 3 of their product. Feedback has been very positive from both existing customers and new prospects alike. To learn the details of VISaer's experience, and the benefits they realized, Read More>> News & Events: Got the Blue Screen Blues? Updating a mission critical application is a serious undertaking, but there are a number of significant benefits that can be realized, including those related to usability. Here is a small selection of examples: 1. End-user training for a usability-engineered internal system was one hour compared to a full week of training for a similar system that had no usability work. As a result of usability improvements at AT&T, the company saved $2,500,000 in training expenses (Mayhew & Bias). 2. A major computer company spent $68,000 on usability work to improve a system that was used by over 100,000 people. The resulting productivity improvement saved the company $6,800,000, which is a cost-benefit ratio of $1: $100 (Mayhew & Bias). 3. Usability techniques allowed a high tech company to reduce the time spent on tedious development tasks by 40%; at another company, usability techniques helped cut development time by 33-50% (Forrester).  Question: What factors should I consider when deciding whether to take my application to Java or .NET? Answer: There are several key factors to consider, including: 1. Hardware and OS: What type of hardware and operating system are you planning to run your new application on, and can take advantage of existing hardware within your organization? If you already have Unix servers, you may want to choose Java, and if you already have NT servers, you may want to choose .NET. 2. Database: Another factor to consider is the type of database that will be connected to your application. Microsoft® SQL Server works seamlessly with .NET, while Oracle® Database will work equally well with either Java or .NET. 3. Skills & Experience: Other factors to consider are the skills of your developers. Have they developed any mission critical applications in Java or .NET, and if so, how was the process and what were the results? If you don't have developers with .NET or Java skill sets, you'll need to factor in hiring or training costs. Java developers typically cost more than VB developers. For a more complete understanding of these factors, please contact CORE Migration. |
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