Better understanding of Legacy systems
Australia and New Zealand Bank (ANZ) run mainframe core banking systems with millions of lines of COBOL code, thousands of user screens, and thousands of databases, using Hogan® Systems software. Over time, as this system has continually grown, the task of determining interconnectedness between system components has become increasingly intractable. The result of this was increased risk in new development estimation, and associated costs in system integration and quality assurance. ANZ needed a reliable way to point at any screen or database element, or any file within their system, and know what other components depend on that element. Only then could the bank perform meaningful impact analysis on proposed or required changes.
Semantic Designs has delivered a suite of Component Connectivity tools that directly read and parse IBM Enterprise COBOL and JCL source code and special Hogan files for ANZ. Once this data is read into DMS, Semantic Designs can perform an array of unique functions, including code formatting, clone analysis, and most importantly, component connectivity. SD's Component Connectivity tool provides the user with a graphical view of system components, with drill-down and exploration capability to identify connectedness at a deeper and more accurate level than ANZ had thought possible.
As an example, with the CC tool, the bank can see precisely how a specific COBOL component interacts with the other parts of the system, without the clutter of the other 10,000 components typical of mainframe systems getting in the way. (This information cannot be extracted from any one of the components; the JCL knows which program runs [but not what it does], and what file bindings to use; the COBOL program knows how it handles files, but not which ones [since files are dynamically bound by the JCL and the Hogan PEM logic], the databases don't know which programs read or write the data). The beauty and understanding comes from the simple view presented, enabled by deep analysis. See the screenshot below.
Of course, one may navigate along the artifacts to view other relationships, or drill down into details.
