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The Change-Management Challenge

The Complications of Integrating mainframe code with new applications

By SD Times News Team

January 15, 2003 — (Page 1 of 6)
Integrating new applications with legacy code-the type of software found on mainframes as well as other older platforms-adds new layers of complication to the job of change management and version control.

Developers building new applications must ensure the applications continue to interoperate with those older systems, across barriers of different platforms, languages, tools and corporate cultures. Often, that means attempting to make change-management and version-control tools interoperate between modern application servers and bell-bottom-era mainframe environments.

The most common method of integrating legacy applications and new code is putting application-server middleware and Web interfaces on host applications. In fact, Meta Group Inc. recently predicted that more than 90 percent of large enterprises will use host-access products that connect to legacy applications via Web services by 2007. Indeed, enterprises have found many different solutions to this problem.

APPLICATIONS COEXIST
For the foreseeable future, new applications will coexist with legacy applications. Verizon Communications, a large telecommunications firm based in Reston, Va., is building a billing system integrating mainframe applications with app servers. The application has 65,000 software items, including CICS assets on the mainframe, and distributed applications running Java and COBOL. The application is distributed on sites spread out nationwide, with about 120 developers working on the project.

The team, according to Jim Winder, Verizon's change-control management/version-control administrator, starts with detailing requirements, then formulates a design, codes, tests, completes the code, performs system tests and moves the code into production. Developers at different stages of the cycle remain in communication with one another. "We do not do waterfall methodology; they all talk to each other," Winder said.

The company (www.verizon.com) uses MKS' Integrity Manager for change management. Developers take change requests, also known as "issues," and Integrity Manager guides them through the phases of the change process, which increases quality control and reduces the need to go back and fix bugs later. "A project that doesn't have to be fixed is a project that causes positive things for business, and not negative ones," Winder said. "It's about giving the business what they need, and making sure that what they give the business works."

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