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How the Netron Data Migration Framework Turns Legacy into Relational

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1. ANALYSIS: An incremental approach to reduce complexity and risk

Working with a cross-functional team of your data modelers, application developers, and business analysts, Netron consultants conduct JAD sessions to accurately identify the source-to-target data relationships that need to be migrated. Netron’s approach organizes the project into manageable portions, focusing on 10 to 20 tables at a time relating to a specific business function—greatly reducing complications and helping you to better manage your project scope. Source and target data structures are mapped and data transformation rules are captured using state transition diagrams. Information in these diagrams provides the specs that are fed into our unique Netron Data Migration Framework to produce the extract, transform, and load programs required to migrate your data.

2. CONSTRUCTION: Rapid development of data migration programs

Netron’s consultants use our proven Netron Data Migration Framework consisting of data components, templates, wizards, and tools that let us quickly develop data migration programs for moving your data from the source database to the target model. The productivity benefits of our framework will prove to be a critical success factor in your data migration. Not only does the Netron Data Migration Framework build data migration programs that correspond to the analysis just completed, the framework, in conjunction with our methodology, makes it easy to do data scrubbing or to correct analysis mistakes. Once unaccounted conditions are identified, it’s just a matter of updating the diagrams, making minor adjustments to the framework, and regenerating the programs.

3. EXECUTION: Turning legacy into relational

The generated migration programs now navigate the input data sets, performing the necessary fan-in, fan-out, data scrubbing and validation operations to produce an ouput file ready for loading into the target RDBMS. Along the way, a complete set of audit logs and error reports is produced automatically, ready for the validation steps, and highlighting any need for a further iteration.

4. VALIDATION & TESTING: Ensuring a complete and accurate migration process

With millions of records spanning the entire source database, Netron consultants take special care with the testing and validation phase of your data migration effort to ensure the programs accurately and completely transfer the data. Tasks include unit testing, examining log and audit files, data scrubbing, system testing, spot checking, and cross validation of the source and targeted databases xnxx.

5. ITERATIVE REFINEMENT: The key to successful data migration

Second and third iterations are a fact of data migration life—nobody gets it right the first time because complex legacy data is difficult to successfully clean and migrate on the first try. Here’s the twofold Netron Frameworks advantage: The programs we create using the Netron Data Migration Framework have built-in exception handling. And they’re designed with rapid iteration in mind. That means any problems associated with the applications are immediately documented into log and audit reports including hidden data exception and data scrubbing requirements, many of which are unknown at the start of the data migration project, as well as invalid assumptions made at the requirements gathering phase. Then the transition rules can be quickly updated and validated, and the programs regenerated and re-executed. Each iteration helps make the subsequent iteration more robust and complete than the previous one until no exceptions are found.

A services-based solution that offers:

• Incremental conversion to reduce project risk
• Business process driven JAD analysis to reduce complexity
• State transition methodology to define data transformation
• Iterative refinement for better data scrubbing
• Rigorous validation and testing
• Flexible data migration framework for rapid program development/migration
• Rules-based program generation
• Innovative analysis tools for finding business rules
• Intuitive development tools for generating better programs faster using new data

Preferred Source and Target Platforms

Source: Netron Data Migration Process can migrate data from MVS (CICS, IMS/DB and batch environments), OS/400, OS/2, Wang VS, and OpenVMS.

Target: Most Unix and all Windows server platforms. If we haven’t mentioned your platform, please contact Netron — our approach’s adaptability means that it can probably be customized to support your needs.

Supported Source and Target Databases

Source: For legacy data, any database that has Cobol access including IMS, VSAM, sequential files, DB2, and Oracle as well as proprietary legacy databases (e.g., Wang DMS or ) that are no longer fully supported by their vendors.

Target: any RDBMS that can load data from text files, or that is supported by ODBC.

Services

System Migration

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Netron delivers legacy system migration solutions while reducing the risk, time, and costs associated with business-critical projects. With over 20 years experience in helping customers build adaptable, dependable solutions, Netron has the know-how and insight to migrate your system.
Since 1981, Netron has been helping customers in some of the most demanding industries deliver solutions to their most challenging application development problems.
Over the years, we have learned a great deal about building great software, managing the development lifecycle effectively, and delivering applications in a fraction of the schedule considered typical in the industry. Systems built using our tools, methodology and expertise are supporting millions of users in enterprises large and small.

Netron understands that today’s needs can change tomorrow. By transitioning your systems to .NET or J2EE, Netron consultants can help your business manage change and be ready for the future with a modern platform that was made to handle the needs of business today.
So if your business objectives require you to migrate your legacy systems to a new environment, large or small, Netron can deliver exceptional value. If you’re looking to revitalize and evaluate your legacy system to cut maintenance costs and improve system adaptability, our industry-leading products can help you. With expertise in legacy and modern platforms and a proven track record in understanding and adapting systems, you can be sure that Netron can deliver quality solutions, on time and on budget.
For over 20 years, Netron has been a leader in helping enterprises keep pace in competitive industries by having business-critical systems that adapt easily to change. Let Netron help your business migrate from Cobol to J2EE or .NET so that your systems can keep pace with your business.

Netron consultants can help your company leverage existing legacy assets in re-targeting your systems to newer, more suitable technology. Basing a new system on an old system reduces risk, costs, and time-to-market, and eliminates potential gaps between what your business needs from its systems and what a package or rewrite can provide. Using Netron’s System Migration Process (SMP) and propietary tool suites, Netron consultants will provide an adaptable, maintainable new system while preserving the business logic, usability, and data of the old system.

Our consultants provide insight and technical expertise for each stage of the migration process to ensure that you are completely satisfied with the end result. A Netron consultant can recommend the right target languages, operating system, and database technologies for your business. Our consultants can manage the migration project and re-architect both the system and the data model for the selected platform and relational database technology, respectively.

Netron’s tools bring automation to speed the process, eliminate errors, and lower the costs of the migration project.

Our two most important tools enable a fast, robust migration of your system’s business rules and data:
• Netron HotRod™ detects and extracts business logic from Cobol programs quickly and completely, separating the rules from the code. This allows us to quickly evaluate the system and ensure that the migrated system supports the same business operations as the original.
• Netron’s Data Migration Framework helps our consultants manage and accelerate the data migration and data conversion processes to a relational model.
Netron’s System Migration Process incorporates the skills of our consultants, our tools, and strong engineering practices to rejuvenate your system and prepare your business for managing future change.

Using HotRod to separate the business logic from the code, and the Netron Data Migration Framework to remodel your databases, Netron consultants can give you the same system re-architected to take full advantage of the appropriate platform. The Netron Reporting Solution will allow your people to easily examine the data they want in a readable, tabular format from a Word or PDF document, without making the investment of time or money into other reporting technologies.

We can recommend the right class of .NET or J2EE solution for your business and work with you to ensure that the end result suits your needs. Your system will be re-architected to meet usage demands, ranging from lightweight, low-volume solutions for fewer users or heavyweight solutions for enterprise-wide applications. The solution will be scalable so that it can adapt to future needs.

Services

Our services

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Training

We offer courses in refactoring, design patterns, white box and black box testing. We offer customized courses that focus on the customer needs.

Refactoring training
Refactoring requires a thorough understanding of the programming language being used. So, during our course we will uncover some of the language pitfalls developers should try to avoid. We will also look at several possible ways to design a system. Finally we will give an overview of the common refactorings, always relating them back to the design. We have an optional course in exception handling.

Design patterns training
Design patterns will give developers a better insight in how to design software. Our course will focus on the most useful design patterns, starting with the simple ones.

White box testing training
This course will show how to gradually build up confidence in your software product by means of white box testing. We teach how to balance costs of late discovery of bugs against costs of white box testing. Early testing can prevent bugs from growing exponentially during development, but it consumes resources! We explain the various white box techniques (unit testing, integration testing, code inspections, …) and we give some rules for how and when to deploy them. We offer specialized courses concerning white box test tools (white box stress testing, class testing).

Black box testing training
Some of the concepts that will be explained in this course are: Business driven thinking, building test cases, making your test process measurable, practical usage of test requirement hierarchies, test strategies (boundary checking, equivalence partitioning), test automation, test implementation, test attitudes.

Outsourcing
Outsourcing frees your in-house resources to concentrate on your core business, saving you time and resources. Using QualityVision’s staff allows you to keep your engineers and management deployed on your development projects, while ensuring high quality testing for your products.

QualityVision outsources test engineers. We can outsource black box and white box testers.

Black box testers are trained in business driven thinking, test strategies and test tools. They can help making your test process measurable.

White box testers are skilled developers who are experts in writing automated tests. Together with your developers they ensure the quality of the code. They can help you in getting your test effort balanced. They know when and how to do unit and integration testing; stress and performance testing.

Test Lab
The test lab from QualityVision is able to test any software or hardware on any platform.

Why choose QualityVision test lab facilities?
Using our test lab facilities has a lot of advantages:

You do not need to invest in expensive hardware and software designed for testing.
You do not need to hire testers that you have to train and to provide with testing tools, office space, and other resources.
Trained professional testers can speed up the testing phase and still meet your time to market deadlines.
You can benefit from our expert know-how to get your own test lab structured.

How does the test lab work?
A Quality Vision consultant will visit you to get the necessary information. A test plan will be written with the following content:

Scope: What kind of tests are needed: portability testing, installation testing, manual reviews, functional testing, performance testing, usability testing, …. What kind of requirements or specifiations need to be tested?
Test bed and test strategies: environmental conditions, test data conditions, test techniques, stop criteria.
Planning: Depending on the scope, non-scope, resources a detailed milestone plan will be written.
Dependencies and constraints: Not only will the dependencies and constraints be documented but evasive solutions will be documented as well.
Writing a test plan and gathering product information normally takes one week. We try to be as flexible and adaptive as possible. All test cases are documented according to the needs of the client. We report bugs by any error report system of choice.