Reengineering

Many enterprises are currently facing the challenge of having to modernise their IT environment. There are still a good number of legacy applications in productive use, which have become outdated and ever harder to maintain. A further obstacle to modernisation, sometimes even to the basic decision how this could be done anyway, lies in the fact that most of these applications are only poorly documented. Sometimes even the business logic behind the code is known only to a small number of "head monopolies". Of course, these most wanted persons are deeply engaged in day-to-day operation and/or in critical projects and usually are not available for modernisation planning.

First level support can be provided by code analysing tools. These Code Analysers allow static analyses of program code and assist IT efficiently in maintenance. Unfortunately, this is not sufficient for a profound understanding of the implemented business logic and will not enable business analysts or the business unit itself to migrate the applications to new systems.

We are going a significant step further now. We have developed a prototype application that uses kenroadsDesigner's AI based concept and its general ability to extract hidden logic from unknown data. It is able to deduce a blueprint for a consolidated business model from the application's source code. This model will comprise all business objects and business rules and show their various dependencies and relations. A business analyst familiar with the business domain will be given the opportunity to validate, modify and confirm the findings and to navigate through the model. 

A simple yet typical example may illustrate the difference to already available tool concepts and the enhanced benefit potential.

Let us assume we have a price calculation system. Because of changing market demands we are forced to modify a certain product's price (e.g. an insurance tariff) and to change the application accordingly. We know that the product in question can be identified by a specific parameter "XYZ" set to the value of "4711", but we do not know according to which conditions and sub-conditions the price is calculated. Of course, we do not know which parts of the application must be changed either.

A normal Code Analyser can assist in finding out which parts of the code do use the parameter "XYZ". Unfortunately, it will not tell you which of these parts are actually involved in calculating the price of our specific product, i.e. when XYZ is set to a value of "4711".

So there still is a lot of manual work to be done.

Our solution, based on kenroadsDesigner, will go a significant step further. It will be able to actually trace down all the way and identify the true path that has to be followed with respect to the specific product in question. You will automatically get to the price calculation logic you are actually looking for and all the conditions that have to be checked along this path.