Overview and Business Case The client, a large Healthcare payer, has a large database application with over 900 forms used each day by thousands of employees, the organization’s agents and clients. It has become a liability as Adabas Natural programmers are dwindling in number. Solution Required The client was looking for assistance in migrating the presentation layer and look and feel of the application while maintaining the business logic and integration with the Adabas database. The client is heavily dependent on the application for its operations and is highly concerned about having a predictable quality assurance process, limiting risks and containing costs. Challenges Because there are so many forms involved, it is difficult to select a subset to work with that represent all possible permutations of Natural code. The ability to develop a reverse-engineering strategy incrementally will be a key to successful implementation. Codiscent Solution Codiscent employed the Reverse Engineering Studio to identify instances of lingual patterns in the Natural code and parse it into a form that can be used to populate a specification dataset from which a C#/Winforms implementation of the user interface forms can be generated. The Codiscent re-platforming approach is based on our reverse engineering process. Results Codiscent performed a POC on a selected subset of the 900 forms and successfully generated all of them in 3 weeks. It is estimated that this subset represents 80%, or more, of the lingual patterns used throughout the entire application, which implies that converting the remaining forms should require a proportionally lower time per form. Takeaways This case demonstrates Codiscent’s approach to application re-platforming or modernization. Some specific subjects of interest include:
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