IBM Rational Transformation Workbench includes the following components and optional extensions:
The foundation of Rational 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 Rational 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 Unlike 'snapshots' of enterprise applications that are out-of-date before they are complete, the Enterprise Application Knowledgebase continues to deliver insight and value even as your applications and business processes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 Rational 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 Rational 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, Rational 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 Rational Transformation Workbench. Project leaders and architects can then utilize Rational Transformation Workbench to modernize and manage the applications targeted through WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer.
The Application Analyzer module of the Rational Transformation Workbench provides metrics, reports, documentation, and visualizations that help application teams and their managers to identify, prioritize, and execute modernization initiatives. It can perform change impact analysis, generate interactive and business-centric diagrams, create system documentation, and browse source code in context-sensitive mode. The new consolidated impact analysis mode in V3.1 helps a developer or analyst to quickly identify how a proposed change will affect the boundaries of the application or subsystem. 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.
Version 3.1 enhancements include:
- Abstraction of Business and Technical Insights
You can create and organize entities stored in the repository through a 'tagging' architecture based on the business function, geography, or other user-defined descriptors. These tag groups can then be given values to apply to entities and groups of entities. Once marked, you can select a diagramming view that focuses attention on a particular tag value of interest. This abstraction enables you to more readily comprehend highly complex systems, and understand their boundaries and interactions. - Rich Diagrams for Documentation and Knowledge Transfer
Application Analyzer generates detailed diagrams of your applications. Because of the depth of analysis provided by the module, analysts can readily 'zoom-in' from high-level scopes to extremely detailed visualizations of their systems. You can also select from a wide spectrum of scopes, including screen flows, dependencies, call maps, and more. Analysts can customize the scope of the diagrams to focus on information of interest, accelerating knowledge transfer. The new ability to abstract diagrams and to add business context greatly enhances the power of diagrams to communicate the structure and relationships of a business process and the software that automates it. - Deep, Synchronized "Hyper Views" that Demystify Complex Applications
Application Analyzer provides an interactive environment in which you can navigate multiple, synchronized views of their enterprise applications. You can select from numerous views, including source code, context parse tree, call maps, data and control flow charts, and many others. A simple click on an element updates the other views, helping you to quickly understand even the most complex system. A new, customizable "Watch Pane" has been added. It provides centralized access to information about a selected software entity. - Flexible Reporting Options that Ease Knowledge Transfer
Application Analyzer generates a broad spectrum of reports that ensure the efficient transfer of knowledge between team members. Management-level application portfolio reports, diagrams and impact analysis, and many other reports can be readily exported in industry-standard formats -- including HTML. New features allow many reports to be run in batch mode, streamlining their creation. - Powerful Search Locates Hidden Artifacts
Application Analyzer provides a powerful querying engine that locates constructs of interest buried within application code. You can search for inefficient or non-standard coding structures, or uncover the elements that will be affected by a particular enhancement. Application Analyzer includes a library of pre-built queries that address common tasks, or you can use a wizard to tailor your own searches.
A new tool helps developers and analyst to focus on what matters to them in their current business scenario. Logic Analyzer leverages Application Architect's algorithms to create a logical 'slice' of a program. The code is then marked within the original program in Source View and Interactive Analysis. For instance, an analyst or developer may want to discover how 'institutional' claims flow through a claims processing system. This flow can now be isolated from other kinds of claims, and better understood by an analyst.
- Boundary Identification to Define Project Scope
Application Analyzer provides an interactive analysis environment to uncover and catalog applications' interface points. By 'resolving' the connections between an application and other systems, you can gain additional insight into the size of an application modernization or maintenance initiative. - Glossary Links Business and Technical Terminology
Extensive usability and capability improvements have been made to Glossary. It is now a central component that bridges business and technical terminology stored in the repository. This allows analysts to map business context onto technical terms. This can help to reduce the challenge of creating accurate functional specifications. It also lowers training times for non-subject matter experts. It provides more intuitive documentation that can be important for compliance activities.
Helping to maximize management control over the application portfolio
Rational Transformation Workbench is designed to improve management’s understanding of your application portfolio. As a result, your management team can increase its effectiveness, helping to create a more efficient development group. After your applications have been verified through the application knowledge base, you can use the Application Analyzer to quickly generate metrics that describe the complexity of the programs in your application portfolio. These metrics many include industry-standard metrics — like cyclomatic complexity, function points, and lines of code, but also allow you to customize the metrics to meet your needs.
These metrics help you determine where costly complexities might lie within your application portfolio, giving you insight into how much effort is required to transform applications or help decrease maintenance costs by reducing complexity. Using this feature of the Application Analyzer, your managers can better scope their projects and prepare roadmaps for maintaining and modernizing your application portfolio, as well as, to create better project estimates and resource allocations.
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 Rational 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.
Rational Transformation Workbench includes language scanners for COBOL, PL/I, and Natural, and "understands" many CICS, IMS, DB2, and Structured Query Language (SQL) constructs.
Version 3.1 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 3.1 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
Support for syntax in Enterprise PL/I and CICS Transaction Server V3.2 will be added after General Availability of V3.2.
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. RTW provides a powerful set of tools for auto-detecting and auto-documenting business rules. It helps you do the following:
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.
Version 3.1 includes enhancements to the business rule discovery, management, and interactive visualizations to help streamline the process of isolating logic that can be decoupled and reused in a service-oriented architecture. Productivity enhancements in version 3.1 are designed to improve the overall user experience with the tool, to make it easier to group business logic in ways that provide meaningful levels of abstraction and document difficult-to-decipher code execution paths in a more straightforward and productive way.
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 Rational 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.
With Version 3.1, Rational Transformation Workbench now enables you to perform multiple domain componentizations in batch mode, helping to reduce 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 Rational Developer for System z.)
The Reuse Analyzer is available to clients with active product support.
IBM Rational Transformation Workbench is powered by Relativity Technologies' proven, sophisticated toolset for rapid application understanding and transformation.
The IBM Rational Transformation Workbench Analyzer for Eclipse adds an Rational Transformation Workbench perspective to an installation of Rational Developer for System z. 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
Rational 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.
