Automated Program Migration

COBOL Migration to C#

At Language Portability, our main goal is to help you reduce cost and improve productivity with a minimum of risk.  The key to meeting that goal is our automated COBOL migration engine that manages COBOL migration to C#.

99.9+% Automation

We can migrate in excess of 99.9% of COBOL migration to C# without manual intervention by combining compiler technology, sophisticated abstraction and syntax analysis with our proprietary emission and optimization technology .  We have spent a great deal of time and effort to achieve this success rate because in a large application, even a small percentage of manual changes can add up to a huge burden.  Consider an application comprised of 2 million lines of COBOL.  This is by no means uncommon among COBOL applications.  With a 99% automated solution 20,000 manual changes would still have to be made.  Even at 1 hour per finished change (coded and tested) that would add 20,000 hours to the project cost and timeline.  By setting the bar at better than 99.9% we greatly reduce the cost of migration.

Maintainable Code

In order to improve productivity it is necessary that the migrated application be readily understandable and maintainable by programmers trained in C#.   Every COBOL program undergoes extensive abstraction and analysis in order to transform it, to the maximum extent practical, from a COBOL-like structure to a more object-oriented, C# structure.  This means analyzing the COBOL Data Division elements and transforming them to native C# types when possible or to our purpose-built classes when COBOL data functionality is required. The paragraphs in the Procedure Division are analyzed, combined and transformed into C# class methods.  The result is a program that is very readable and extensible using the standard techniques with which every C# programmer is familiar.

Minimum Risk

There are two main risks we seek to minimize with our automated solution.

1. The first is the risk of introducing errors during the migration process
2. The second is the risk of failure to meet SLAs due to poor performance of the migrated code

Our approach to minimizing these risks is based on the belief that the data manipulation and statement execution rules of COBOL must be exactly followed in the migrated application.  In order to accomplish this we have devoted significant time and effort in developing a set of classes and methods to allow certain unique COBOL characteristics to be replicated in C#.  Years of experience with language translations has shown us that this is the surest way to minimize migration-induced errors and performance issues.

Seeing is Believing

While technology is great, at the end of the day our clients care about meeting their goals.  The surest way to understand how we can do this is to see our technology in action.  If you would like to see a demonstration and arrange to see a sample of your own COBOL modernized by our technology, contact us and we will be happy to accommodate you.