Cognizant’s Migration & Modernization Center of Excellence (CoE) is a focused group of technology experts specializing in legacy technologies as well as migration of legacy applications to new technology platforms. The CoE focuses on developing solutions, tools and methodologies to facilitate migration of applications and data from older platforms to newer technologies, thereby providing operational, tactical and strategic recommendations on leveraging legacy assets.
Services offered by the CoE:
Legacy Re-engineering
Often, legacy systems that fail to keep pace with business needs are also poorly documented and inextensible. In these cases reusability is tough to achieve because understanding the existing system and making changes to it is difficult. Therefore modernizing the existing application is impossible, or very expensive. In such cases, the CoE can carry out a complete re-engineering (or re-development) of the system. Redevelopment has two parts to it:
- Reverse engineering of code to extract design information
- Forward engineering the extracted information into components
Database Migration
Data reverse engineering is a relatively new reengineering approach that addresses situations where organizational understanding and/or the physical condition of its data systems has deteriorated or become complex and confusing. This happens typically when organizations develop stand-alone or ‘stove piped’ systems. Database migration addresses these issues and enables easy exchange and maintenance of data. We recommend a solution approach for database migration, which automates phases like program (data access calls) conversion, database design conversion and data migration.
User Interface Migration
Legacy interfaces are often a set of text screens running on a terminal. Organizations employ UI modernization techniques for enhancing usability of legacy systems by non-invasive rebuilding of their front end. These techniques involve wrapping old, text-based interfaces with new graphical interfaces. Typically, the new graphical interface communicates with the old one using specialized commercial tools. These tools often generate the new screens automatically by mapping the old ones. The CoE recommends screen scrapping as a cost effective way to move legacy applications to the Web and drastically improve their usability while preserving stability. It also helps leverage the capabilities of UNIX or NT-based Web servers without reengineering the existing mainframe application.
Language Migration
Organizations often face problems in maintaining legacy code. Applications might be written in obsolete languages and might be difficult to maintain. Our Automated Migration solution addresses this issue by translating it to a more modern language without changes to functionality or design - rendering it capable of running on the original or new platform. The choice of destination language ensures user-friendliness, portability, maintainability, reusability, ease of development, and utilization of the increasingly powerful features of contemporary hardware.
The Migration & Modernization CoE recommends the use of a comprehensive toolkit for Automated Migration. This toolkit comprises of scanner and parser generator tools that work with high-level specifications and can incorporate new constructs and transformations. They minimize design errors and reduce development and processing time as compared to manual translation.
The CoE also offers a host of tools and approach documents for automating migration scenarios, including
- Code Analysis Tools
- Inventory analysis tool
- Impact Analysis tool on Cobol/Easytrieve/PL1 programs
- COBSAT (COBOL static analyzer tool)
- Impact Analyzer Tool on 'C' programs
- Data Migration Tools
- IDMS to DB2 conversion tool
- VSAM to DB2 conversion tool
- Data Mapper tool for mass change/conversion projects
- Application Conversion - Culprit to Cobol Code Converter
- Test Coverage Analyzer for Batch Cobol programs and PL/I programs
- Business Rule Extraction tools
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