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| Success Story |
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| Client: |
State Tax Office |
| Project: |
COBOL to JAVA Legacy Transformation
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"In over 16 years of implementing complex tax systems, this project has been by far the
most successful implementation to date. The translation of the COBOL code to
JAVA using the translation software was a tremendous success. Our experience of working with this skilled and responsible migration team reconfirmed our view that reengineering enables a business or government agency to reap the benefits of modern technology without the significant risk and cost associated with wholesale
replacement"
-- Project Manager
Background: A US Local Government agency has a legacy IBM COBOL Application with proprietary extensions. The agency was looking to modernize the system in order to bring the system up-to-date with new technology and reduce maintenance costs. The agency had standardized on Java language for all new development.
Migration of the Legacy COBOL application to Java was seen as an essential part of a much larger picture of modernization activities with the following benefits:
- Migration of existing application will not result in changes in Business Processes
- The system can continue to be maintained by existing personnel
- Moving from Proprietary to Open system Service Oriented Architecture
- Reduce Maintenance costs
- Easier integration of the Legacy Application with the more recent Java developments
The technical objectives were as follows:
- Maintainability of the java code: The new designs should be maintainable by java developers with little or no training
- All further functional enhancements to system should be achieved seamlessly in java
- The translation framework should easily be adopted to non-functional enhancements:
- SOA
- Changes to screen design
- The translation should support deployment to large user base.
The Translation Toolkit was identified to meet all above objectives, and was used for translation of a total of 5 Million lines of code in phase-1 of the project.
Once the new java system tested and base-lined, a 2nd iteration consisting of functional enhancements, screen redesigns, and implementation of SOA layer were performed incrementally. The benefit of the approach was that each incremental change could then be tested quickly against the based-lined system.
Implementation Timescales
The following resources were used for the translation and enhancements (Screen-redesign, SOA, and functional changes) of the 5 million line of COBOL code into a new Java application:
- 8 Java developers: used for iteration-1 (Translation, Compilation, Build) and Iteration-2 (SOA
architecture, re-design of screens, and integration with older parts of system)
- 8 Testers involved in Unit Testing of new system
An additional 4 testers were involved in User-Acceptance Testing.
The project was successfully completed and delivered in 15 months.
A manual migration of the project was estimated to take some 10 times longer, and 4 times more expensive.
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