IBM Asset Transformation Workbench includes the following components and optional extensions:
The foundation of Asset Transformation Workbench is the centralized, current Enterprise Application Knowledgebase. The knowledgebase is the starting point for better insight into an application portfolio, and for executing higher-value initiatives.
The understanding of applications begins with visually rich, detailed documentation of core enterprise applications. Previously hidden knowledge about business rules and processes can be quickly analyzed and repurposed to address urgent business priorities. The knowledgebase of application information provided by Asset Transformation Workbench can help reduce risks and costs associated with managing outsourcing relationships, consolidating operations following a merger, complying with regulations, and implementing on demand and enterprise application modernization initiatives such as moving to an SOA environment.
Once the Enterprise Application Knowledgebase has been loaded with information about the applications, the detailed understanding it provides to the team is always refreshed, on a schedule convenient for the user. Unlike 'snapshots' of enterprise applications that are out-of-date before they are complete, the Enterprise Application Knowledgebase continues to deliver insight and value even as your applications and business processes evolve.
Tactical information can be readily accessed through a Web browser or a PC, helping to avoid bottlenecks in the flow of important information about applications. Developers, business analysts, and project managers can interact with current documentation, metrics, and diagrams to better understand their systems. Analysts can generate reports that help to simplify audits and accelerate compliance initiatives. Managers can use metrics and reports to focus appropriate staff on the most urgent needs. Companies can also rely on Asset Transformation Workbench to address high-value, strategic business activities like application consolidation, resource allocation, and outsourcing management.
The application portfolios of most organizations contain a wide variety of languages and environments. To manage and understand these many systems used to require multiple tools and processes that drained time and resources. However, the flexibility of the knowledgebase's meta-model can allow programs written in multiple languages to leverage Asset Transformation Workbench.
Efficient analysis of an application portfolio requires the ability to quickly assess extremely large enterprise applications, determine areas of interest, and then focus effort on the applications with the most urgent needs. Through a software bridge, Asset Transformation Workbench and WebSphere® Studio Asset Analyzer integrate to address this requirement. Developers can rely on WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer to rapidly generate a high-level understanding of their systems, and then pass the insight and impact analysis across the bridge to Asset Transformation Workbench. Project leaders and architects can then utilize Asset Transformation Workbench to modernize and manage the applications targeted through WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer.
Application Analyzer is a robust, repository-based module used to document enterprise applications and perform analytic tasks. Application Analyzer can improve productivity and reduce costs associated with the maintenance and enhancement of enterprise applications. It is a noninvasive interactive module that creates a comprehensive repository of system relationships including source code, system files, DDL, screen maps, and more. It can help perform impact analysis, generate interactive graphical system diagrams, create system documentation, and browse source code in context-sensitive mode. Application Analyzer can provide information that makes it possible to analyze complex applications with confidence, bring new development team members up to speed quickly, accelerate the execution of maintenance / transformation tasks, and reduce the risk of change.
New features in V2.1 include the following:
- The WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer Bridge supports more use cases. You can now get a list of files and their locations in your source management system or PDSes corresponding to:
- Applications as defined in WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer,
- Files identified in a WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer impact analysis, or
- Files necessary to build a set of programs
In addition, the configuration and prerequisites for the WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer Bridge have been simplified: a mid-tier WebSphere Application Server and DB2® are no longer required. The new WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer Bridge is implemented as a Web services client communicating directly with WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer elsewhere on your TCP/IP network.
- Data flow graphs and reports are provided.
- Query Repository adds the capability to do searches on all objects in the repository (not just within the scope of a particular project). It lets you hone in on key relationships of an object from the Repository Browser -- all the programs that call another program, or all the programs that update a data store, for example. From the results, you can launch further queries without having to return to the Repository Browser. You can create printable relationship reports and export them to a variety of standard formats.
- Verification reports offer a convenient way to analyze verification results for a project. The report displays the verification status and number of verification errors and warnings for each source file in the project, and a count of each type of error and warning issued for the project.
- IMS analysis now provides a more precise view into screens, segments, and transactions.
- The Clipper tool now has the ability to list search results by source file only rather than always finding and listing every occurrence of a query construct. This allows for much faster searching in cases where one only needs to know search results at a file level rather than knowing every occurrence of a construct within every source file.
- Search results lists allow you to 'stack' queries and search within the results of another search.
- National Language Support has been extended to include English, Japanese, and Korean.
Application Profiler can help boost productivity by providing technical and business users with the information they need to effectively understand and plan their enterprise applications -- all without impacting the source code. This flexible, browser-based tool gives nonprogrammers such as support, quality assurance, and business analysts insight into their systems without requiring specialized knowledge or skills. Technical users that are unfamiliar with their enterprise applications can also rely on Application Profiler to quickly access documentation, understand their system's structure, and determine the impact of code changes. Business users can apply Application Profiler to analyze system-level reports, and to assess where to direct resources in order to enhance or renovate the application portfolio. When used with the Business Rules Extension, the Application Profiler module's convenient interface can help organize and annotate business rules without disturbing development.
New: Assembler support is now provided within Asset Transformation Workbench. This support provides "level 1" support, specifically focusing on complexity metrics and potential calling relationships between modules. In addition, calling relationships between other languages such as PL/I, Cobol and the Assembler modules can be visualized and queried.
Asset Transformation Workbench includes language scanners for COBOL, PL/I, and Natural, and "understands" many CICS, IMS, DB2, and Structured Query Language (SQL) constructs.
Version 2.1 includes the latest syntax for the following languages and subsystems:
- IBM Enterprise COBOL, Version 3.4
- IBM DB2 Universal Database™, Version 8.1
- IBM CICS Transaction Server, Version 3.1
- ACUCOBOL-GT, Version 6.1
- Micro Focus COBOL, Version 3.2 (level 10)
Version 2.1 also supports the following:
- User interface
- BM CICS® BMS
- IBM IMS™ MFS
- IBM System i™ screens
- Data
- Program data definition
- VSAM and flat-file definition
- Structured Query Language (SQL), including ANSI standard and IBM DB2 databases
- Other Languages
- VS COBOL II, Release 4
- IBM OS/390® COBOL, Version 2.2
- IBM AS/400® COBOL, Version 3
- Software AG Natural
- PL/I
- Job control language (JCL)
- Assembler
The Business Rules Extension can give users a variety of ways to navigate complex code to identify, document, and organize business rules. It provides an interactive environment that can help dramatically reduce the amount of time developers spend searching through source code to find and identify business rules. The Business Rules Extension identifies candidate rules using developer-driven sophisticated search algorithms. This rapid process generates a list of rules for the targeted application, allowing analysts to view each rule and verify its inclusion. If preferred, the Business Rule Manager can also help analysts to conduct their search manually by guiding the process and providing tools to simplify each step. After the rules have been found they can be documented and organized, allowing future users to quickly understand the use of each rule. And because the rules are tagged, analysts can quickly locate the rules within the code and modify them to respond to business process changes. Further, because rules remain persistent despite changes to the code, the business rules will stay relevant and useful even after the application is placed back into production.
New features in V2.1 include a more powerful set of tools for auto-detecting and auto-documenting business rules. V2.1 helps you do the following:
- Employ data flow impact analysis when defining business rules
- Create custom attributes suited to your particular needs
- Match input/output data elements with the business names you have assigned to them in your application data dictionary
- Edit rule attributes in batch mode
- Indicate that a rule activates a set of other rules
The Business Rules Extension is an optional, separately priced feature.
Application Architect can help increase the productivity of a development group when restructuring, componentizing for inclusion in a service-oriented application, or renovating many existing applications. Application Architect uses sophisticated algorithms to partition code into new components. The componentization of logic results in a structured architecture that can reduce complexity and facilitate modernization. By componentizing enterprise code, developers are able to greatly increase the performance of frequently used programs. Application Architect can help to ensure that the components created are complete, working programs in accordance with the functionality of the original application.
Componentization can help reduce maintenance costs by:
- Isolating business logic into discrete programs and limiting the scope of future changes
- Reducing testing, due to business logic isolation
- Enabling parallel change activities with business logic being separated into individual programs rather than being combined in larger programs
- Accelerating application understanding
- Freeing 'key' developers who were previously the only ones that understood these complex areas of code
With a componentized application developers are able to take advantage of service-oriented architectures by allowing the Web service to call a component.
Clients' experience with Asset Transformation Workbench technology shows that up to 20% of all application code may be functionally 'dead,' that is, it can never be executed but continues to be maintained by the team. This waste of resources can be avoided through Application Architect by automatically locating and removing the dead code.
New features in V2.1 include the following:
- Support for EXEC DLI statements
- The ability to perform multiple domain componentizations in batch mode, reducing the time and effort required when similar actions need to be taken on a large number of source programs
The Application Architect Extension is an optional, separately priced feature.
The Reuse Analyzer can help you rapidly assess an application's suitability for reuse in an SOA. Specifically, it can help to:
- Categorize CICS and IMS programs written in COBOL by the type of work they do (screen, business logic, data access, hybrid, and so on).
- Identify some potential architectural "traps" that would require remediation before making a particular program or program call hierarchy available as a Web service.
- Create Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files corresponding to selected data elements in your program you wish to make available in a Web service. (A WSDL file can then be used with XML Services for the Enterprise, which is a feature of WebSphere Developer for zSeries.)
The Reuse Analyzer is available to clients with active product support. Note that there are separate installation packages for Asset Transformation Workbench V1.1 and V2.1.
IBM Asset Transformation Workbench is powered by Relativity Technologies' proven, sophisticated toolset for rapid application understanding and transformation.
The IBM Asset Transformation Workbench Analyzer for Eclipse adds an Asset Transformation Workbench perspective to an installation of WebSphere Developer for zSeries. This perspective includes five integrated and synchronized Eclipse views:
- Program context (this program and the objects to which it relates)
- Impact analysis (this program and other programs and data that make up an application)
- Program flow (paragraph-level flow within a program)
- Flowchart diagrams (statement level within a paragraph)
- Repository browser
Asset Transformation Workbench Analyzer for Eclipse generates multiple views of structure and flow of programs, helping developers to quickly "get up-to-speed" on the nature of their programs. These interactive views provide developers with reports on application artifact interrelationships, a "contextualized" view of how elements fit into the application as a whole, and flow charts and call maps that illustrate the behavior of the program.
In addition to understanding programs in the application, it is important that developers know how a proposed change will affect the rest of the application. The Analyzer for Eclipse impact analysis view reveals which elements will be affected by a modification to the code. Developers can ask "what-if" type questions, thereby helping to reduce the risk of disrupting critical applications as a result of incomplete changes -- and helping to complete these essential analysis tasks more quickly.
Analyzer for Eclipse includes support for the most common mainframe asset types including COBOL, PL/I, Job Control Language (JCL), DB2 Data Definition Language (DDL), and EXEC commands for CICS, IMS and DB2.
