How AveriSource Helped a Federal Agency Execute Their First Successful Business Rules Extraction Project

The Customer

An independent agency of the U.S. Federal Government with 1,000-plus field offices and over 60,000 employees operating with an annual budget exceeding $1.3 trillion.

The Challenge

With several previous attempts having failed, the public sector customer needed to successfully mine and document business rules from their mainframe code. The source code was a mix of low, medium, and high complexity with heavy use of domain and application-specific acronyms and abbreviations. The customer also needed to translate thousands of variables to make output accessible to their business analysts, in addition to developing a data dictionary and filtering out extraneous code. Lastly, the government agency needed to limit Subject Matter Expert (SME) involvement to approximately 6-8 hours a week, as well as enable non-domain, non-developer, and more junior resources to extract business rules effectively.

The Obstacles

The documented business rules reside in the source code of many enterprises. Understanding these rules is vital when faced with managing, modifying, extending, or modernizing these systems. Efficiently extracting this logic is particularly difficult in complex legacy applications where SME and technical knowledge is scarce.

The Approach

Source Code Processing

INVENTORY & DISCOVER

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 public sector 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.

Rule Analysis

‍ANALYZE

The delivered suite of reports accelerated the process of requirements gathering while reducing SME input and ensuring accuracy, which included:

• Business Logic: complete accounting of logic in control flow
• Rule Chaining: interactive extraction across process flows
• Rule Tree: end-to-end view of conditional flow
• Routine Flow: control flow at paragraph/routine level
• Annotated Source: categorized view of expanded source code
• Control Flow Diagram: graphical representation of logic flow
• Data Dictionary: details on variables and methods

Business Process Mapping

ANALYZE

Analyzing program connections, data operations, jobs and transactions, the AveriSource Platform™️ automatically generated call chain diagrams of application “entry points.” These entry points were then mapped to the business functions they supported, reducing the need for SME input and accelerating the business rule extraction process. This business alignment capability also enabled the identification of obsolete and commodity processes for removal or replacement.​

Rule Extraction Methodology

ANALYZE

AveriSource's proven methodology enabled business analysts to efficiently extract business rules from legacy applications with a minimum amount of prior application expertise. The method married business process mapping with unique business rule artifacts to give analysts a business-centric view of application source code and its underlying business logic. As a result, AveriSource Analyze increased analyst efficiency more than 10x.

Business Rule Chaining

ANALYZE

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.

The Results

The AveriSource Platform™️ was installed and configured on day one and commenced extracting business rules by the end of the first week. Utilizing AveriSource Analyze, the customer was able to bring code containing business rules into focus and filter out extraneous code. The public agency increased their productivity of rule extraction and streamlined business rule documentation exponentially. The first successful business rule mining project after several previous failures​, the customer increased the expected productivity of resources by more than 10x and reduced SME involvement to just hours per week.