Software Re-Engineering - Performance

Performance Optimisation

LinksMultiple’s performance optimisation services focus on diagnosing and removing performance bottlenecks. The performance bottleneck can be in a number of areas such as:

·         System growth due to ad-hoc requirements

·         Inefficient logical / physical application design

·         Inefficient application code for data access

·         Operating system limitations

The performance optimisation can involve the following :

·         Database redesign

·         Tuning of data access

·         Restructuring of code and processes for improved efficiency

·         Detection and removal of obsolete code

Document Generation

A typical challenge faced by companies is managing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of lines of legacy application code. Often, this code is not well documented and rarely are the documents kept updated during the maintenance phase. This leads to poor maintainability and is also a major hindrance in system knowledge transfer.

LinksMultiple’s services would help client create / update system documentation. This increases maintainability, facilitates knowledge transfer and also allows the client to review duplicate / dead programs which are almost always consequences of ad-hoc development.

 

LinksMultiple’s expertise in different product suites such as SEEC Mosaic Studio, Rational Rose etc. can automate a significant part of the documentation effort leading to lower cost as well as greater accuracy

Extraction/Mining of Business Rules

Invaluable business knowledge is locked up in the legacy systems of organizations. This value is not easily isolated in business rules or differentiated from general-purpose code. Such business rules should be extracted and reused to form the basis of the new e-business architecture. Extracting existing legacy business rules and reusing them in a cost-effective way gives businesses the tactical advantage in the marketplace and speeds up the time-to-market of their e-business strategies.

 

LinksMultiple would provide organizations services related to scoping, designing, and creating quality reusable parts and package the business rules for reuse. We would also provide cost-effective component-based development and implementing component-based application architecture based on industry standards such as COM, CORBA, and EJB.

 

Business rules are core policies and algorithms that capture the nature of an enterprise's business model. These business rules are fundamental to the business model and are technology independent.

 

The major extraction techniques are:

 

·         Computation based extraction which produces a functional slice of a program based on the execution path and the data definitions required to calculate the value of a given variable at a specific point in the program.

·         Domain based extraction which produces a functional slice of the program based on the fixed value of an input variable. This type of extraction separates individual transaction types into encapsulated e-components with clearly defined APIs.

·         Structure based extraction which allows a system partition a program into a series of independent business rules on the basis of its physical structure rather than on its underlying business processing.

·         Global extraction that lets analysts apply all the previous techniques across multiple programs, in effect supporting system-wide business rule extraction.

Web Migration Services

The challenge for present day organizations is to preserve the wealth of the captured business knowledge and have the system fit into the component world of the new e-architecture. Organizations want to exploit the graphical user interface (GUI) extension technology to extend the presentation layer of internal mainframe-screen based applications to external users via the web. There are a number of ways a legacy system can be web-enabled. In this section the following techniques are discussed for legacy to web transformation.

Using Web Services and Web Gateways

Most of the Transaction Processing monitors (for example CICS, IMS/DC) have come out with some products to communicate to web and thus providing gateways to enable the existing interfaces. The capabilities of the products range from providing quick web-enabling needing no changes to the application to a redesigned solution to leverage the advantages of a multi-tier architecture.

 

Web Services

This approach makes use of legacy vendor supplied tool (for example, CWI 3270 Bridge for CICS) for web enabling the character-based screens. Such products provide facilities to generate HTML pages which are stored in the legacy system itself.

This is the quickest way to web enable an existing application. However, it simply provides the capability to use the existing screens through a browser. Other advantages of Graphical User Interface (GUI) based system and multi-tier architecture will not be realized through this process.

 

Web Gateways

Gateways provide the facility to develop interface between the legacy system and the web server. This technique is also widely used to web enable the existing system. This facility (for example, CICS Transaction Gateway with EPI) may be adopted to use GUI features without changing the existing application. However, the same gateway with ECI may be used to realize greater flexibility of GUI. Using ECI features, the existing source programs are modified to eliminate the screen handling part. The data exchange is carried out through COMMAREA. 

 

Screen-Scraping Techniques

 

 

 

 

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