After having completed the task of identifying some data aproaching overflow, BNP Paribas Assurance (one of the biggest insurance companies in France) wanted to evaluate the volume of maintenance needed on their application portfolio in order to plan for the necessary changes.

This project was initiated on an MVS environment including, apart from COBOL programs, an extensive set of NOMAD schemas and procedures. No parser (source analyzer) for Nomad was available on the market.

GFI Informatique and Deisk have been selected to carry out this project - GFI because of their knowledge of the client's IS and their well-known skills with this kind of project - Deisk, as a partner of GFI for several years, bringing the expertise in Application Portfolio Management and Cartography, Impact Analysis and Language analysis Parsers. Deisk used the ASG-becubic Legacy product to create the repository.

Testimony

Olivier Esnault - Senior Project Manager- GFI :
'The flexibility of the product has helped build a strong solution to match customer's needs, based on customized but still reproductible processes.
The produced Impact Analysis reports reached a sharp level of detail, allowing instant use of the results, and that allowed the client to precisely plan the effort to bring their preventive maintenance project into play.'

Targets

Beforehand, a parser for Nomad sources has been designed by Deisk in order to bring into light the mandatory changes to be made to schemas and procedures. The accuracy level required by the project being quite sharp, this parser analyzes macroscopic objects (schemas, procedures, master…) as well as microscopic objects (items, variables…), thus enabling to show data propagation inside procedures and also to follow Nomad calls in the JCLs.

The project has been conducted in 2 phases, in consistency with the two main goals : Documenting and Evaluating

Phase 1 : Document

• List and count components of the application portfolio,
• Define the project perimeter,
• Classify components according to the applications hierarchy in use at BNP PA,
• Deliver a simple to use documentation.

Phase 2 : Evaluate

• Identify the volume of required changes,
• Identify the technical aliases of data to be transformed, and every impacted component of the perimeter (programs, copy, procedures, schemas,files…),
• Reiterate the process in order to filter the results according to target data size criteria.

Project

We conducted the project though the use of iterative methodology and automated processing.

During the Documenting Phase, they allowed for an exhaustive inventory of the portfolio, classified in accordance with the customer's application hierarchy.

During the Evaluation Phase, running successive steps of impact analysis have resulted into intermediate documentation, made available to the customer who was to validate them. Each data had different status, making possible to keep the propagation to new data into control. Besides, tracking the arrival of new data into the propagation list step by step made the propagation cone clearly visible. The final results show the impacted programs as well as technical data implementing selected input functional data, through Deisk's impact analysis method inside each component and between components of the system.

The strong involvment of teams from BNP PA, GFI and Deisk during analysis and validation tasks have allowed an efficient and simultaneous progress.

Result

An Intranet site presents the different documents grouped by theme: Portfolio description, cross-references, impact analysis result documents an so on.

The reports are either summary or detailed in order to meet the different needs that were expressed during the specifications part of the project.