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An American financial services firm with subsidiaries operating in the consumer finance and insurance industries with more than 1,500 branches across 44 states.
An AveriSource partner, a Global Systems Integrator (GSI), sought an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) with a software platform capable of reducing workload on SME resources, onboarding 100+ developers, increasing software development velocity, and reducing rework and testing requirements. With over 10 million lines of code in a monolithic, complex environment with very little system documentation, the financial services customer was having difficulty keeping pace with business requirements leading to a high potential for defects and rework.
The customer grappled with numerous challenges at the project's onset. Sparse system documentation and a slow developer onboarding process heightened uncertainty. Over-reliance on limited subject matter experts complicated this scenario, making it difficult to match the pace of evolving business requirements. These interconnected challenges increased the risk of defects and rework, fostering inefficiencies and elevating costs.
By uncovering insights on source code languages, detecting missing or unused files, and ensuring environmental completeness, AveriSource Inventory and Discover enabled accurate resource planning, timeline estimation, and informed decision-making throughout this customer’s application modernization journey. By identifying the languages contained in the legacy environment, the logistics customer could determine if the legacy code — or specific portions of it — can be supported by the new target system. In addition to generating a baseline inventory, the customer was also able to map entry points within their environment.
To fully understand the scope and purpose of their applications, the customer implemented several key strategies. They began by overlaying business processes on application processes, assessing the number of application components, their complexity, and examining the user interfaces and variable translations. This helped them to navigate application entry points and business triggers, and visually explore program call chains to understand program dependencies and connections better. Leveraging flowcharts, they grasped the program logic flow and automated categorization of data sources. Through identifying different types of data sources referred, executing CRUD operations for each data source, and mapping to data source structures, they gained a comprehensive understanding of their applications.
To reduce the potential for errors reaching production, the customer used AveriSource Analyze to find all references to variables, identifying impacts to application components at the program, paragraph, and variable levels. By identifying dependencies across business functions, cross-references between application components, programs accessing a copybook, programs referring to a data source, and programs with their invoking jobs and transactions, they created a robust framework for error prevention, which also included identifying data sources accessed by multiple programs.
To improve code quality and reduce issues, the customer focused on several key areas. They identified complex programs through complexity analysis and decision points, which also informed effort estimation and resource allocation. By identifying and removing dead and duplicate/redundant code, they reduced maintenance efforts and optimized their codebase through componentization and modularization. In addition, they identified code anomalies and checked adherence to coding standards and guidelines, ensuring high code quality and mitigating potential issues.
The AveriSource Platform™️ played a crucial role in enabling the customer to achieve substantial improvements in their operational efficiency. Analyzing over 10,000,000 lines of IBM AS/400 COBOL and RPG code, the platform aided in streamlining processes and further diminishing reliance on SMEs and senior developers. It accelerated the onboarding process for over 100 developers and significantly reduced the time required from Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), facilitating faster integration of business requirements. This led to a marked increase in efficiency, reducing rework by more than 35%, and contributed to a lower defect rate.
