AveriSource Accelerates Business Rules Extraction and Modernization Project Delivery For U.S. State Government Agency
The Customer
A U.S. state government agency.
The Challenge
When a global systems integrator (GSI) needed full business rules extraction, removal of technical debt, and requirements documentation for their state government client, they turned to AveriSource. The public sector client—comprised of three separate agencies—was utilizing an IBM mainframe and proprietary database built in 1987 and comprised of Model-204 programming language. The client was facing high maintenance costs with difficulty retaining staff with knowledge and skills in Model-204.
At the directive of the state's governor and legislature, agencies that didn't eliminate duplicate systems, streamline business process, and improve performance reporting were at risk for not receiving federal funding due to the government system not meeting modern data standards. Additional project requirements included the ability to discover these deeply embedded business rules, identifying obsolete and common functionality between agencies to be migrated to new or existing systems, in addition to the mapping of functional requirements to technical business rules after conducting an "as-is" technical analysis of the current system.
The Approach
The AveriSource Platform™ enabled the agency to perform a complete mainframe migration roadmap and recommended functionality improvements, in addition to the generation of business rules reports, requirements documentation, and business functional analysis for specific programs and lines of code within applications.
Inventory & Discover
Using AveriSource Inventory and Discover, the agency examined the full application architecture, existing data sources, data lineage and connections, interdependencies, and relationships across the legacy application.
Product Reports and Features Utilized:
- Application Overview
- Connections
- Clusters
- Data Lineage
- Dependencies
- Source Code Processing
Analyze
Using AveriSource Analyze, the customer identified, analyzed, and extracted core business rules, while reducing technical debt and optimizing its Model-204 codebase. The results delivered use cases and requirements documentation a full 14 months ahead of schedule, with the original estimated project timeline of 18 months.
Product Reports and Features Utilized:
- Business Rules Extraction
- Code Analysis
- Code Quality
- Rule Chaining
- Rule Analysis
- Variable Tracing
The Results
In just four months, over 4.2 million lines of Model-204 legacy code were analyzed, including business rules extraction and code quality improvement. Additional outcomes also included:
- Significant acceleration of business rules extraction and documentation requirements
- Reduced dependency on mainframe subject matter experts and resources
- Creation of an embedded repository and knowledge location, including a data dictionary to bridge the gap between business and technical users
- Elimination of significant amounts of dead, obsolete, and duplicate code
