Often Trinity Millennium Group is brought in by organizations to address their legacy application challenges. The IT industry has yet to settle on a de facto standard for modernizing older source code, and frequently our new clients come to us after trying other approaches:

• Off-the-shelf code conversion tools offer push-of-a-button modern code translation. Such tools are based only on syntactic transformation, , so they cannot provide an architecturally correct transformation like Trinity’s Automation Enabled Modernization (AEM™) approach. As a result, the code quality produced by such tools tends to be low, which a critical shortfall in supporting future application maintenance and enhancements.
• Existing legacy source code can be re-hosted on a new infrastructure platform, typically by emulating the legacy run time environment. This approach can relieve pressure related to hosting costs and obsolescent machines, but the legacy source itself still represents a number of challenges. Decades-old software is often brittle and difficult to maintain. The re-hosting approach also leaves the organization reliant on the availability of legacy programming skills, which are becoming more and more scarce. Impending shortages of IT resources often represent a very real deadline for modernizing legacy code.
• Perhaps the most frequently attempted conversion approach is to manually re-write a legacy application with a modern language such as C# or Java. This seems like it should be a low-risk approach, since most IT organizations have significant application development experience. Re-write projects entail significant challenges. Industry experience shows they tend to be high-risk, lengthy, and expensive. A typical “greenfield” development project stops when a few dozen or a few hundred requirements have been met. An application transformation, however, must account for millions of lines of legacy source code that embody decades of enhancements to capture exceptional logic. Manually discovering and replicating all this logic is a long and immensely complex task, typically resulting in costly re-work late in the project when omissions are discovered.

Trinity frequently provides support for such organizations beyond simply taking on specific application transformation projects. The same senior resources that developed Trinity’s AEM™ tools and approach can help your organization identify and apply sound software engineering approaches, across the entire spectrum of your IT initiatives.

Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V)

One of the key support services requested by many of our clients is Independent Verification & Validation of previous modernization efforts. The goal is examine the results of a completed application conversion (typically a manual re-write) and determine:

• Whether the new application is functionally equivalent to the legacy application; and
• The extent to which software engineering best practices for design and coding are exhibited within the new application.

Trinity’s proprietary software analysis tools give us a unique ability to capture complete metadata about both old and new applications, and to perform gap analysis to identify any differences in methods, algorithms, or functions. We report on discrepancies and advise on recommended mitigation approaches to ensure new applications are brought up to compliance.

Software Engineering Center Of Excellence (SECOE)

Trinity’s software engineering support can go far beyond helping with modernization initiatives. Trinity can establish and operate a Software Engineering Center Of Excellence to support all software development and maintenance performed within the organization, including work contracted with third-party providers. Trinity’s experienced staff of senior resources augments the client’s IT expertise to:

• Answer questions and collaborate in establishing best practices;
• Monitor and suggest remediation where helpful for ongoing projects;
• Research industry trends to address specific client needs; and
• Provide resources to augment project teams when specific skills are in short supply.

Call today to find out how your organization can benefit from Trinity’s Software Engineering Support Services Request a Call.