How AveriSource Fast-Tracked Success on one Federal Agency’s Maiden Voyage into Business Rules Extraction

The Customer

A massive U.S. federal agency responsible for managing mission-critical programs underpinned by large, legacy mainframe applications. These complex systems supported essential operational workloads across more than 1000 field offices housing more than 60,000 employees tasked with delivering essential services to millions of beneficiaries and stakeholders across the country.

The Challenge

The agency urgently needed to modernize legacy COBOL-based mainframe applications containing decades of accumulated logic and business rules. With little to no documentation, limited visibility into embedded processes, and looming supportability risks, the agency required a methodical, reliable, and accelerated approach to modernization. They also sought a cloud-based approach, leveraging the scalability, security, and innovation of AWS. With several previous attempts ending in failure, this public sector customer recognized the importance of successfully mining and documenting business rules from their mainframe code. It consisted of a diverse mix of low, medium, and high complexity code which included heavy use of domain and application-specific acronyms and abbreviations. The agency also aimed to translate thousands of variables to improve output accessibility for business analysts while simultaneously establishing a comprehensive data dictionary and filtering out extraneous code. Due to tight timelines and resource constraints, the agency also had to limit Subject Matter Expert (SME) involvement to no more than 6-8 hours a week, while enabling non-domain, non-developer, junior-level resources to lead the task of extracting business rules effectively.

The Obstacles

The project’s complexity presented multiple obstacles:

• Lack of Comprehensive Documentation: Little to no documentation existed regarding the legacy COBOL source code or embedded business rules.
• Complex Legacy Logic and Dependencies: Decades of accumulated logic created intricate dependencies and challenging business-rule chaining scenarios that were difficult to untangle.
• Business Process Visibility: Stakeholders needed clarity on end-to-end business processes embedded in legacy applications to support informed decision-making.
• Cloud Migration Concerns: The agency required a secure, scalable cloud environment to host extracted rules and processes, with proven reliability and compliance.

The Approach

The agency selected AveriSource, an AWS Migration and Modernization Competency Partner, to harness AveriSource’s expertise in automated application analysis, business rule extraction, and modernization solutions. The solution leveraged AWS cloud infrastructure and AWS Marketplace offerings, providing a reliable, scalable environment for modernization activities.

The Environment

AveriSource leveraged AWS and a variety of AWS Marketplace solutions, including AveriSource Scan, AveriSource Rapid Assessment, and the comprehensive AveriSource Platform for application modernization. AWS offered secure, scalable infrastructure, enabling rapid deployment and streamlined application modernization processes.

Source Code Processing

INVENTORY & DISCOVER

AveriSource Scan rapidly inventoried and analyzed all the legacy applications (mostly comprised of COBOL), automatically identified embedded logic, dependencies, and business rules, significantly accelerating the initial assessment activities. By uncovering insights on languages and dialects, detecting missing or unused files, and ensuring environmental completeness, AveriSource Inventory and Discover enabled accurate resource planning, timeline estimation, and informed decision-making throughout the modernization journey. By identifying the languages contained in the legacy environment, the federal agency could generate a baseline inventory, map entry points, and determine if the legacy code — or specific portions of it — could be supported by the new target system and easily determine whether special handling and care would be necessary to maintain performant continuity post migration.

Rule Analysis & Business Process Mapping

Utilizing advanced capabilities of the AveriSource Platform hosted in AWS, the team generated precise business process documentation, identifying relationships, application flows, and critical business functions embedded within legacy code. Our proven methodology enables analysts to efficiently extract business rules from legacy applications with a minimum amount of prior application expertise. This method marries business process mapping with unique business rule artifacts to give analysts a business-centric view of source code and its underlying business logic. As a result, AveriSource Analyze increases analyst efficiency by more than 10x.

Rule Extraction Methodology

AveriSource’s sophisticated rule extraction methodology systematically translated embedded COBOL logic into clear, standardized, cloud-friendly documentation, optimized for future-state AWS-hosted modernized workloads.

Business Rule Chaining & Dependency Analysis

A major complexity in requirements documentation is tracing rule flow as control is passed between programs. To overcome this difficulty, AveriSource Analyze’s rule chaining capabilities combined business rules, data lineage, program connections and process sequence to empower users to extract rules within the complete “chain” of logic through an entire process. This provided deep visibility into rule chaining scenarios and simplified dependency analysis with automated tools designed to account for the context of AWS infrastructure.

The Results

By combining AveriSource’s advanced analysis technology with AWS’s robust cloud infrastructure and the convenience of on-demand marketplace solution availability, this large federal agency achieved accelerated, successful modernization outcomes. Most notably:

• Accelerated Project Delivery: Automated analysis and extraction using AveriSource Platform on AWS significantly accelerated the initial assessment and documentation phases, reducing project timelines by months compared to traditional methods.
• Comprehensive Business Rule Documentation: The project delivered accurate, comprehensive documentation of all critical business processes and embedded rules, with cloud-accessible resources empowering future modernization efforts and informed decision-making.
• Enhanced Scalability and Security: By leveraging AWS, the project teams could harness immediate scalability, security, and compliance standards required by the federal agency, ensuring protection of sensitive data while enabling rapid modernization progress.
• Streamlined Cloud Migration Path: AWS Migration and Modernization Competency instilled confidence and validated expertise, ensuring the agency received best-in-class modernization capabilities from a specialized AWS Partner in AveriSource.
• Vendor and Platform Agnostic Documentation Approach: The documentation generated by the AveriSource Platform was technology-neutral and cloud-compatible, providing flexibility for future technology adoption and integration into AWS or hybrid-cloud strategies.

Conclusion

Through their partnership with AveriSource and AWS, this large federal agency rapidly overcame its legacy modernization challenges, gaining unprecedented visibility into critical legacy applications and embedded business rules. By leveraging advanced automation, AveriSource solutions, and a robust AWS environment, the agency accelerated their modernization journey and established a reliable foundation for future expansion and ongoing innovation.

With detailed, actionable, cloud-hosted documentation and clearly mapped business processes, the agency is now fully equipped for informed decision-making, confident vendor and technology selection, and continued operational excellence as they advance their modernization and growth initiatives.