Business Rule Identification and Extraction through Netron HotRod

How do you migrate from a legacy COBOL system to a modern architecture and ensure that your existing business functionality will still work?

For years you have relied on COBOL as your application development language –– and for batch processing huge amounts of data, it’s hard to beat. But now, your customers are demanding better access to their accounts; your operational units need real-time updates to their data; your supply channel partners insist on closer integration with their systems –– and it seems that just about everything needs integration with the Web.

While COBOL is still efficient at data processing, the language has become much less strategic to the future, because it has lagged in its support for the Internet, layered application architectures, distributed systems and code reuse. By comparison, modern language environments offer ready-to-use class libraries and application objects for Internet, data and Web Service access.

For these and other strategic reasons you have decided it’s time to convert your system to a modern development and deployment platform that will serve your business for the next decade. But can you afford to re-analyze, rebuild and rewrite everything from scratch? Converting to an object-oriented paradigm will require you to morph your business rules into a new class-based object architecture. The challenge in the conversion is getting the correct design requirements. The best definition of the existing requirements is in the current system, and you need to find them quickly. The most compelling reason to reuse your existing business logic is to accelerate the time to market for the replacement system. The next most compelling reason is to reduce risk –– by ensuring your requirements are complete.

The fact that your current system contains millions of lines of COBOL code compounds the problem. The presence of cloned logic further complicates the matter. You need something that can:

• quickly identify business rules in large COBOL systems
• associate the rules with the related data;
• isolate this information into a component design with an interface;
• identify and help eliminate redundancies in the rules
• provide a means to document the rule and extract it from the old system
Netron HotRod™ is the most advanced solution for identifying business logic, isolating and documenting the code that supports the business functionality, and wrapping it in an interface that can be extracted and used to create the business objects in the new architecture.

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