Expedited Business Rules Extraction and Requirements Documentation for Australian Federal Agency
The Customer
An Australia-based federal government agency.
The Challenge
When a global systems integrator (GSI) needed full business rules extraction, removal of technical debt, and requirements documentation for their international public sector client, they turned to AveriSource. Their client, an Australia-based federal agency, also needed a complete understanding of their application and data structure, in addition to identification of specialized business rules.
They also needed to decompose existing legacy modules from its mainframe to an AWS hybrid cloud environment, in addition to accelerating the migration toward microservices to leverage the full benefit of the hybrid cloud environment. Other project requirements included the ability to discover these deeply embedded business rules and data within Model-204, COBOL, and ObjectStar languages to design a future-state set of applications.
Lastly, adapting the complex data model and partitioning data service as abstracted API services would be crucial to drive the migration project to a successful completion.
The Approach
The AveriSource Platform™ enabled this government agency to immediately gain deep insight and knowledge into its large legacy portfolio, supporting an Accelerated Rewrite™ of a complex mainframe application via generation of business rule reports, requirements documentation, and other application artifacts.
Inventory and Discover
Using AveriSource Inventory and Discover, they examined the full application architecture, existing data sources, data lineage and connections, interdependencies, and relationships across the entire application portfolio.
Product Reports and Features Utilized:
- Application Overview
- Connections
- Clusters
- Data Lineage
- Dependencies
- Source Code Processing
Analyze
Using AveriSource Analyze, they identified, analyzed, and extracted core business rules, while reducing technical debt and optimizing its Model-204, COBOL, and ObjectStar codebases. The results delivered use cases and requirements documentation using an Accelerated Rewrite strategy for its highly complex applications.
Product Reports and Features Utilized:
- Accelerated Rewrite
- Business Rules Extraction
- Code Analysis
- Code Quality
- Rule Chaining
- Rule Analysis
- Variable Tracing
The Results
- 3 million lines of Model-204, COBOL, and ObjectStar legacy code analyzed, including business rules extraction and code quality improvements
- 5x acceleration of business rules extraction and documentation requirements
- Source code and business rule analysis improved downstream project velocity by over three times while maintaining effectiveness and accuracy
- 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
- Mitigated risk of finding missed requirements in testing
