MoRE (Modular Reverse Engineering)

MoRE sheds light on the mysteries of your legacy applications. Applications age and become harder to maintain, extend or replace over time. Be it to support application maintenance or a broader application modernization effort, MoRE is a cost-efficient way of re-discovering how your applications work.

In today’s market, IT departments have to efficiently support business processes and deliver integrated solutions flexible enough to quickly react to emerging requirements. At the same time, budgets for running and maintaining these solutions have to be met. In general, legacy applications will be involved in delivering such solutions, making application understanding even more critical to corporate success.

Challenges faced by IT Departments

• Support of business processes. Existing application landscapes often do not entirely match evolving business requirements, implying the need to extend existing applications or integrate them into new solutions.
• Application end of life. Applications reach the end of their lifecycle and have to be replaced, either as a planned activity in application landscape management or in response to application entropy.
• Fading knowledge. Application and technology experts move on or retire. Knowledge is partially lost in the process, imposing a growing risk on the maintenance, extension and integration of legacy applications.

Impact analysis. Many of today’s essential applications have grown for 20 or 30 years and often suffer from sparse and out-of-date documentation. The impact of changing such an application is hard to assess in its entirety, amounting to unpredictable project costs and timelines.
The majority of large corporations and SMEs have recognized these challenges and consider a gradual migration of their business applications to more recent technology platforms promising easier integration, applicability of modern architectural and development paradigms as well as readily available sourcing options.

Strategies for Modernizing and Migrating Applications

A large variety of strategies can be applied to modernize or to migrate an application. Our experience at Interactive Objects shows that sthere is not any one strategy fitting all scenarios. The selection of a strategy granting both technological and economical success has to accommodate a number of driving forces, such as suitable depth and coverage, timelines and budget, in-house knowledge and skills, ourcing/outsourcing options, and intended reuse for other applications.
Strategies fall into the one of these categories or are a mix:

• Standard software. Discard bespoke application. Replace with customized standard software.
• Redevelop. Discard bespoke application. Redevelop from scratch using current business requirements.
• SOA-fy. Expose or wrap existing application services.
• Re-host or cross compile. Transition to new technology. No re-engineering.
• Re-engineer. Analyse bespoke application. Re-factor, SOA-fy or redevelop, merging implemented requirements with current business and architectural requirements.

The Interactive Objects Approach

MoRE is iO’s solution toolkit for maintaining and modernizing legacy applications. It comprises methods and tool components targeted at reverse engineering and optionally also encompasses integration with the forward-engineering part of a modernization endeavour. Regardless of the modernization approach, the business and IT knowledge hidden in legacy applications is a valuable asset, and MoRE helps you recover it.
Our modular reverse-engineering suite facilitates the static analysis of legacy applications, thus supporting the bottom-up phase of the modernization horse shoe. Beyond, it also supports semantic analysis of implemented business processes as well as human interaction in the top-down-phase.
The reverse-engineering part of MoRE generates an abstract view of the legacy application, identifies programs/functions, data structures, dependencies and components as clusters of data and functionality. MoRE being immanently modular, analysis heuristics can be flexibly adjusted or extended to account for patterns or coding/naming conventions applied in the legacy application.
As a next step, MoRE allows to relate the artefacts obtained from the bottom-up step to their original business intention through interviews with application and domain experts. This part of the top-down phase matches implemented requirements with current business requirements and supports a gap analysis. Both steps can be applied iteratively and incrementally.
iO’s MoRE suite automates the recovery of legacy application design, relying on typical patterns and guidelines we already know and others you contribute. It supports crucial modernization tasks such as analyzing dependencies between your application modules and predicting the impact of an intended change. Reports provide a graphical representation of your progress so far, and structural information can be exported to UML. MoRE currently supports a choice of technologies including COBOL, PL/1, Delta COBOL and C, but can be extended to support any procedural language.

MoRE Advantages

Do MoRE with less – our somewhat contradictory motto describes your potential benefit. By automating the tedious and error-prone legwork of analyzing legacy applications and carrying analysis results forward to subsequent process stages, we help our customers to keep their forces focussed on the creative part of legacy modernization:

• Reduce operative expenses through increased efficiency and quality.
• Reduce the cost of impact analyses by more than 50%.
• Re-establish business and IT architecture knowledge in house rather than outsourcing it.
• Make your maintenance processes more flexible, faster and more reliable by tool support.
• Base the selection of modernization strategies on solid analysis results.
• Ensure a consistent level of quality throughout a modernization process.
• Merge implemented with current requirements, getting the best out of both.
• Detect duplicate functionality or data.