EZ Source provides comprehensive support for the family of CSC SMART / LiFE applications, in order to improve their support and maintainability in order to maximise its flexibility and business value.
Many CSC LiFE users have added significant custom functionality in order to fully meet their business requirements. This has led to Applications management and Maintenance activities being the responsibility of the user, or at best shared with CSC. EZ Source is aimed at that category of user, where the need to offer effective support, continue to add product enhancements and improve the management control are increasingly important.
EZ Source is an Application-oriented Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB) that automates Application understanding, analysis and technical documentation for use in all Application Management activities. Synchronising with your source configuration management system (such as Clearcase), it contains a full inventory of your Application components and their details. By visualising the internal Application structure, dependencies and relationships, EZ Source is an indispensable tool for support activities as well as a precursor to undertaking enhancements and modifications. It is designed for use by all technical staff as well as having management components for transparency into Application metrics. |
| Overview |
CSC LiFE has matured into an industry leading set of Insurance applications, implemented in many large Insurance providers. The applications comprise a large number of objects and components, including SMART elements, Cobol code, CL programs and a complex database structure. EZ Source provides a platform to automate the analysis and documentation in order to enhance the ability of technical teams to support, extend and optimise these Applications.
EZ Source provides appropriate functionality for all users involved in Application Management, integrated by a common repository that contains information on all elements with their parameters and relationships. Automated mapping of all LiFE components boosts the effectiveness of impact analysis processes and change management, ensuring both increased flexibility and quality improvements. |
| Benefits |
Fast to deploy and use, EZ Source provides proven business benefits faced with the real world challenges of helping existing users maintain their CSC LiFE application.
Some of the key benefits are:
- A reduction of overall delivery costs of between 10 - 18%
- Improved Application quality and performance
- Improved Application longevity, flexibility and business value
- Expert level Application knowledge throughout the team
- Improved Management understanding
- Improved planning and predictability
- Improved ability to integrate CSC LiFE with external applications
- Extremely rapid implementation and time to value
When performed manually, industry figures conservatively estimate that analysis consumes 30% of all Application Management resources, and even then is often incomplete and inaccurate because of the lack of supporting technology. EZ Source's ability to fully automate all aspects of analysis allows technical teams to improve both performance and quality, based on an accurate and comprehensive understanding of all Application components. In turn, IT Management can then base decision making and planning on a quantitative understanding. |
| The EZ Legacy Edge |
| By supporting all LiFE iSeries / AS/400 components, EZ Source is able to resolve and understand all interdependencies and aspects of the application structure and related metrics. EZ Source supports all CSC LiFE versions including LiFE/J, LiFE/Asia, Polisy/Asia and Group/Asia. |
| EZ Source: Underpinning Enterprise Application Management |
EZ Source fully automates LiFE Application analysis, documentation and measurement, helping organisations with the real world problem of managing their existing Application portfolio.
EZ Source correlates the relationships between the different Application components and automates the production of technical documentation. Through its ability to parse different Application components (for example, source code, OS scripts, record and set definitions, screen maps, transactions, messaging system data, Application server data, CL programs etc) and then visualise the internal Application structure and dependencies, users can select their starting point and navigate across or drill down as required, in order to precisely determine the scope and level of analysis. This Applications CMDB functionality is complemented by a rich choice of visualisation and reporting options so users can precisely define the scope and depth.
Many different options are provided to visualise the analysis according to requirements and results. For example, a particular analysis may reveal complex interdependencies with different types of components, so EZ Source has user definable dependency levels, filtering and different visualisation layouts in order to achieve optimum understanding. In all stages in the analysis, EZ Source synchronises with the source code so developers can understand exactly how functions are performed. |
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| "Where used" visualisation |
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In addition to this internal program analysis, EZ Source also includes database and interface components so that the relationships can be understood from the most relevant perspective. If conducted manually, it is difficult to identify even straightforward questions such as "where is this record used in my application?", or "which DB/400 tables are accessed by this Cobol program?". EZ Source provides complete results in seconds.
An additional option is a comprehensive reporting portal used to measure different aspects of the Application. EZ Reports includes both industry standard metrics (e.g. McCabe, Halstead, Function Point) and user-definable parameters. Invaluable for Management and Architecture requirements, it allows quality and code standards to be institutionalised into the development and review process. In addition, it also gives developers valuable insights by documenting aspects such as "where used" and "dead code" occurrences. |
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Many organisations will have existing infrastructure that is complementary to the EZ Source analysis capabilities. The product therefore provides a wide range of integration options so that EZ Source can be loaded, or provide data to be both current in its analysis and add value to other products.
Some examples are:
- Source Configuration Management Systems - automatically loading and propagating changes when they occur from platforms such as Clearcase, PVCS, Endevor, Librarian, Changeman and Panvalet
- Planning - export of Application metrics to Excel for work planning and estimation
- EZ Source API - exporting data from the EZ Source repository to other systems such as an Enterprise CMDB |
