Re: cobol code assessment


apple.time@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> My boss just asked me to do a Cobol code assessment for our company.
> He has given me no guidelines on what is expected of me. I have worked
> with cobol for 20 years, so I know it quite well. I am not to use any
> 'tools' for creating metrics on the code. I guess the company is
> trying to decide if our programs are 'good enough', or whether we
> should be rewriting them in some newer technology. We have both
> on-line systems for data entry and batch processing. They want me to
> have an analysis for them in a week. HELP! What do I do? fyi... I
> plan to talk to everyone on the team.... from programmers, system
> analysts, data base administrators, help desk, users, etc. But, they
> want me to examine the CODE itself as well. This is the piece that I
> am unsure of. If you have any web addresses of how to do this, it
> would be MOST appreciated. Also, if any of you have done this, if you
> could show me your final analysis (without the company identifying
> information, of course!) THANKS

Just in case others have missed it:

Perhaps you could analyse the number of lines, the number of programs
and the systems which use those programs. Differentiate between batch
and online code. If you had the time (and you haven't) you could have
done some kind of function point analysis which would give you a
measure of size and complexity of any one system.

Others have commented about ease of maintenance but how about asking
just how much work is there outstanding which the users would like to
have done. A difficult-to-maintain system might have no work
outstanding and may be 100% reliable whereas an easy-to-maintain system
might be bug-ridden with tons of outstanding work. The latter might be
a good case for re-writing or replacing but the former would be a good
candidate for leaving alone.

I suspect that your boss wants to know how much Cobol code you have, in
which systems it resides, how reliable it is and what kind of workload
is outstanding on it. He probably wants to replace it with a
language-du-jour or flavour of the month OO system.


Finally, unless your boss gives you a proper scope statement (ie
details his requirements and criteria for success) then you are on a
losing sticky wicket.

.