The Astadia FastTrack Factory

Industrialization of Mainframe Migration

The market of legacy migrations, where a complete (mainframe) application is automatically migrated to a fully equivalent application based on state-of-the-art technologies has long been the exclusive field of highly technical and specialized companies. By offering its FastTrack Factory to partners and customers, Astadia takes the market to the next level: industrialization.

The FastTrack Factory industrializes the process of migrating and testing legacy applications, delivering migrated and technically tested applications, characterized by high quality, and short elapse times. To achieve this, the Factory builds upon clear processes and top automation tools: CodeTurn, DataTurn, TestMatch, and DataMatch.

What Does the Factory Require?

To migrate the legacy application, the Factory needs to receive:

• All its source code (programming and scripting, including the screens) according to clearly specified delivery standards
• The associated data structure definitions.

All migration tools have extensive means for parameterization, which is an additional input to the Factory that steers the actual migration. Once the application is migrated, the testing starts.

Testing requirements

• For testing of online applications:

1. Recording of representative end-user activities
2. Test data.

• For testing of batch applications:

1. SYSOUT listings
2. Test data

Using the TestMatch and DataMatch testing tools, all tests are executed and, where needed, the migration tools are tuned, and the test is run again for verification.

What Does the Factory Deliver?

Together with the migrated application the Factory produces a testing report (QA) illustrating the quality of the migrated application.

CodeTurn & DataTurn

CodeTurn is a powerful tool to automatically transform legacy source code into modern source code that is both very well maintainable and 100% functionally equivalent to the original. COBOL to Java, Natural to C#, VSE JCL to Powershell, and zOS JCL to Bash are typical examples.

DataTurn provides automated migration of data from many mainframe and legacy data stores to state-of-the-art relational databases. For example, it can migrate Adabas, CA IDMS, IMS-DB, and files to RDBMS.  All steps required to migrate the application get configured in a Workflow Manager. This Workflow Manager enforces the process and abstracts the complexity of the migration to, typically, clicks on buttons with feedback after each step. This removes the possibility of human error.

Finally, tools from third parties have successfully been integrated into the Factory as well. This integration is completely transparent to the partner (and customer) that uses the Factory.

TestMatch & DataMatch

TestMatch is an automated testing tool which automates the verification of the migrated application's behavior with that of the legacy.

DataMatch is a testing tool which automates the verification. It shows if the database updates performed by the migrated application are the same as those from the legacy application.

Methodology

Legacy migration projects get executed following an advanced methodology that allows combining ongoing application maintenance with the migration project.

Using the Platform for Your Transformation Project

The Factory produces a migrated application that had been tested before being delivered to the customer. When this application gets released, the delivery and its integration in the customer environment is still required.

The delivery can be performed by an Astadia partner and includes tasks such as project management, infrastructure management, integration testing, user acceptance testing, knowledge transfer, and the actual go-live.

During all these phases, the FastTrack Factory remains operational and supports the partner where needed. Complex projects often have special requirements that need to be addressed as well, such as replacing an exotic job scheduler or an uncommon reporting technology.

Finally, partners and customers have the option to license FastTrack and use it as a stand-alone platform. In this case, Astadia provides an extensive knowledge transfer and support for all licensed tools.

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