So you've just inherited several COBOL programs from a newly retired co-worker. These programs are huge, and you have only a slight idea what they do, or what they touch. How do you go about discovering how they work? This is where IBM Rational Developer for System Z (RDz) and IBM Rational Asset Analyzer (RAA) can help you understand what your source does, what it affects, and what risks are at play in changing those systems. This was presented at the 2013 IBM Innovate Conference in Orlando, Florida.

1. Software Archaeology with RDz and RAA
- discovering what you've
forgotten, knowing what you've inherited
Christopher Sayles
Consultant, Strongback Consulting
christopher.sayles@strongback.us
Ujjwal Sinha
Product Manager, Rational Asset Analyzer
Ujjwal.sinha@in.ibm.com
Session Z-1573
© 2013 IBM Corporation

2. About Us: Strongback Consulting
 IBM Advanced Business Partner
– Rational, WebSphere, Lotus, Information Management SVP certified
– Strongly focused on Enterprise Modernization and application lifecycle management
– Key Industries Served: Finance, Insurance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Government
– Rational Design Partner for HATS and other Rational enterprise modernization
technologies
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http://www.strongback.us
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3. Agenda
 The business challenge from the view of the IT manager or executive
 Viewing the big picture with Rational Asset Analyzer
 RAA Features
 New features in RAA 6.1
 The view from the programmer analyst
 How to conduct archaeology on your source code
 RAA and RDz integration
 Analytic tooling within Rational Developer for System z
3

4. The Executive’s Business Challenge
 Manage complexity
– Control expenses associated with large, old, brittle application carrying costs
 Manage risk
– Increased complexity drives up production defect rates with corresponding
business impact
– Developers who understand the semantics of these systems are close to
retirement – assuming the Wall Street gods don't repeat 2007/2008 follies
 Leverage production application value
– Operational drivers for business are your Enterprise Systems
– Exploit the processing in working production code by coupling it with mobile
and distributed application access – through:
* SOA
* Business Rules Mining
4

5.  Using old 3270-based tools
– TSO/ISPF … introduced circa ~1974
100% manual/character-based tooling
- Error-prone
- Labor-intensive
Application Complexity
How is z/OS application work done?
Application Shelf Life
 Even "no tools"
– Given the limitations of the ISPF environment for large-application
maintenance, support and development, many programmers and programmer/analysts
actually prefer to use sticky-pads and paper clips with source listings for source analysis
tasks
(if you think we're kidding ask them)
 The above nets out to an extreme*** curve for application maintenance, production
support and development process
 How do you flatten "Application Carrying Costs"?
5
*** Euphemism for expensive

6. 
RAA is a static code analysis tool

It stores the semantics of your applications in a
repository and exposes the operational flow details
of your Enterprise Systems:
–
Graphically
–
Through hyper-linked relationships
–
As Business Rules
Reducing complexity and associated cost/risk for:
–
Application discovery
–
Program analysis
–
Data flow analysis
–
Impact analysis

RDz is a modern development IDE

It leverages the technological advances over the
last forty years and provides:
–
Integrated: Edit/Analyze/Syntax Check
* Integrated within the product and with RAA
* Integration with SCM and green-screen tooling
–
Eclipse-style development functionality
–
Complete development/maintenance/production
support lifecycle coverage
Application Complexity
Flatten Application Carrying Costs using RAA + RDz
Application Shelf Life

7. Your world
 Composed of:
– Systems
• Applications
– Application elements
– Relationships among application
elements
 The semantics of your application
are buried in:
– Source code
– Documentation – which is only as good
as it is current and accurate

8. Your world through the lens of RAA
Transaction Diagram
Composite
Load Module
 Application meta-data elements
and relationships among
elements graphically exposed
through hyper-links stored in a
relational repository
– Up-to-date
Batch Job Diagram
– Precise

9. Your programs exposed through the lens of RAA
 Program meta-data, elements
and relationships among
elements graphically exposed
through hyper-links stored in a
relational repository
– Always up-to-date
– Precise
Repository "meta-data" on COBOL programs
Program flow

10. RAA + RDz Benefits

Lowered application Carrying Costs
through:
–
Decreased analysis time & effort:
* Application semantics rendered
graphically and hyper-linked across
all elements and relationships in
the application repository
–
Decreased development time & effort:
* Modern integrated graphical tools
* Integrated graphical workbench
–
Improved testing facilities
* Code Coverage
* Automated unit testing framework

11. More RAA + RDz Benefits

Lowered risk:
–
Application semantics – normally only understood by SMEs captured in the RAA Repository
–
Improved application quality through code review rules which expose potential performance
and maintenance improvements risks and improvements

Simplified application governance through RAA's metrics and high-level application
dashboard

Satisfies the development cravings of Generations X, Y and Z
–
11
Eclipse-based contemporary workbench

12. Rational Asset Analyzer’s role in Enterprise and Enterprise
Modernization
 Software artifact inventory
Traditional
View
 Business rules artifacts inventory
 Application understanding
 Change impact analysis
 COBOL Business Rules Mining
 Collaboration platform for all
 Persistence platform for human knowledge about your apps
New View
 Provides a common language for Business, Dev & Ops to share
 Cloud ready
 Language agnostic capability
RAA provides Common Language
Business
Owners
Development/
Test
Operations/
Production
Monitor and Optimize
Customers
Develop and Test
Release and
Deploy
Continuous Innovation, Feedback and Improvements
12

13. What is new in RAA 6.1
 Code Review for COBOL
 Language Agnostic Business Rules
 RTC Integration – scanning files from
RTC with RAA
 Usability & Currency

14. RAA - Surfacing Code Review for COBOL
 Code Review for COBOL gives focus when clients have hundreds (or thousands) of programs to improve
 Gives the enterprise view allowing to identify programs that should be actually looked at RDz
 Its static set of 19 rules
 Can be automatically run during inventory, identify statements consistent with the rules
 The results are:
 persisted for use in Custom Queries or sophisticated analysis using 3rd party reporting or visualization
tools
 highlighted in Related source view line-gutter
 summarized in Program summary page tab
 itemized in Program details page tab

15. Language Agnostic Business Rules
Provides selected rule mining functionality for any file, crating a
platform for capturing, persisting and sharing human knowledge.
 Use in concert with, also language agnostic, symbol scanning
 With new detail page actions and new user dialogs any text file can participate in
business rule rules inventory and impact analysis.
 Functions include:
 Relate any file to a business rule
 Relate range of lines in a file to a business rule
 Related files appear in new section on Business rule details page
 Rule relationships are highlighted in a new Related source view line-gutter
 Impact analysis may be run on rule assets to determine their relationship to other enterprise
assets

16. Language Agnostic Business Rules
Relate any file, or range of lines in a file, to a business rule

17. Language Agnostic Business Rules
Related files appear in new section on Business rule details page

18. Language Agnostic Business Rules
Rule relationships are highlighted in a new Related source view line-gutter

19. Language Agnostic Business Rules
Impact analysis may be run on rule assets to determine their relationship to other
enterprise assets

20. Scanning Rational Team Concert stored files with RAA
 The solution developed by IBM Integrated Solution for System z Development team
 Adopted and enhanced by RAA team to help in RAA development by scanning RAA files from RTC
with RAA itself.
 The value of two product working together is more than a simple sum; added value:
Each RAA scans is recorded ad RTC build
Scan history available in RTC as build results page
The log files from RAA scans are published to RTC as build scans and made available directly
from RTC interface

21. Usability and Currency
 Usability
– Exporting diagrams in SVG
– Printing Diagrams
– Export of UI table content to CSV
– View logs on the menu
– Hashsum based incremental scanning
 Currency
– DB2 v9 & 10 syntax in embedded SQL
– Eclipse 4.2 support for RAA plugin for RDz
– Many documentation updates and improvement

22. Usability - Exporting diagrams in SVG
Usability - Printing Diagrams

23. Usability - Export of UI table content to CSV
Usability - View logs on the menu (with sort also by timestamp)

24. Usability - Hashsum based incremental scanning
 Works for all distributed files and scanning COBOL/PL/I on workstation
 Content based (not file name and not timestamp based)
 Not yet enabled for scanning PDSes on z/OS
 Ability to explicitly force rescan (checkbox to Inventory wizard)
 Following action will force rescan implicitly
– Queue container for analysis
– Queue selected
– REST request for analysis
– RAA plugin - scans are on save after file changed or explicitly requested by the user

25. RAA on Windows - Installation simplifications
 The only mandatory pre-req remaining on Windows is DB2
 The option to use an embedded application server instead of
IBM WebSphere Application Server is now available. RAA
now embeds an application server, WAS Liberty Profile
8.5.0.1. This is an optional use, lightweight application
server.
 Option to use full enterprise strength of IBM WebSphere
Application Server remains
 Rexx is no longer a mandatory prerequisite. RAA now
embeds Open Object Rexx 4.0.1. If a version of Open
Object Rexx was previously installed on the system and is
not otherwise needed, it can be uninstalled.
 Java is no longer a mandatory prerequisite. RAA now
embeds the Java Runtime Environment.

26. 26

27. The view from the programmer analyst
Understand old
code is much
like conducting
an
archaeological
dig
27

28. A day in the life of a software archaeologist
1. A “Production Problem” arises
2. No one knows the source code
3. Code has been handed down from
developer to developer
4. Was compiled years ago
5. 20K lines of code…. or more
6. YOU get “selected” to debug the
issue
7. Spend DAYS understanding it
8. change one line, test
9. Repeat step 8…several times
10. Refactor to remove dead code
28

29. The white elephant: 12,000 lines of spaghetti
 Where do you start?
 Unpredictable abends
 Hard to navigate
 Difficult to create a “mental map”
 Potentially lots of dead code
 Out of date comments
29

30. Viewing down into the pit
Program Control Flow
Diagram:
 Birds Eye view of source
 Treat it like a blueprint
30

31. Your programs analyzed with RDz + RAA
Integrated functionality:
• Analyze
• Code
• Syntax check (real-time)
• Debug
• Work with test data:
• DB2 tables
• QSAM/VSAM files
• IMS database segments
• Manage z/OS datasets
Real-time syntax validation
Content Assist-based coding
Integrated analysis + coding

32. Digging sideways – Performance Hierarchy
Perform Until
Statements
Understand where your
code goes from where you
currently are.
Each element is navigable
to another.
32
Conditional
Statements
Potential
program
fall thru

33. Finding nuggets of information
Data Elements View – a sortable view of all your data elements
33

34. Finding Unreachable Code
Unreachable
Code
34

35. Refactoring
Refactoring = make system-wide code changes without
affecting the behavior of the program
Auto format source code
… and how many hours have you
spent doing that by hand??
35

36. Resources
 Check out all our links for our presentations, including this one
–https://delicious.com/strongback/tag_bundle/Innovate2013
–“one link to rule them all”
36

37. Complimentary Sessions of Ours
1212A
1393A
37
Making a HATS a
Dolphin - Northern E1
Strategic Investment:
Integration with Relational
Systems and Web
Services
The Caffeinated
Dolphin - Northern E2
Mainframer: Java on
System z with Rational
Developer for System z
Wed, 5/Jun, 11:15 AM 12:45 PM
Thu, 6/Jun, 11:00 AM 12:00 PM

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