For many enterprises, the recession has made one decision abundantly clear: Modernizing legacy applications can’t wait. Their complexity and inflexible nature make them simply too expensive to maintain, not to mention a risk to the business. Postponing application modernization one more year is no longer an option, which means your legacy transformation must begin now.

Legacy applications should be replaced with modular applications, which are easier to build and modify and offer more out-of-the-box functionality. In many instances, modular applications offer everything in a legacy application but don’t require thousands of lines of custom code.

Taking the first step with transforming legacy applications can be daunting. With possibly millions of lines of legacy application code, where do you begin? The answer is visual intelligence technology. Like an x-ray, visual intelligence technology can visually dissect your legacy code, revealing all kinds of important information.

As with any problem, you can’t formulate a treatment plan until you’ve diagnosed the situation. In the past, gaining an accurate view of your enterprise’s code was probably a huge manual effort, requiring weeks of work. Using visual intelligence technology, you can now achieve the same results in a matter of minutes.

Visual intelligence technology can analyze legacy application code quickly, revealing important attributes critical to an application modernization effort.

For instance, the image above, rendered by visual intelligence technology, is a graphical representation of a legacy application’s subsystems. These subsystems comprise the application’s underlying code and associated architecture. The graphic reveals critical information, such as:

• The complexity of the code
• The size of the application
• The number of I/O statements, which shows the storage-dependency of a subsystem
• The amount of work required to transform each subsystem of code (for example, by rewriting it in a more modern language)

Visual intelligence technology can then examine each subsystem and analyze its modules. This will reveal duplicate or unused code that has been created over the years.

It’s important to note, however, that not all code is equal. Before you devise a modernization strategy, you need to understand the functionality of your legacy applications. Understanding where you have handwritten code will allow you to more easily replace it with modern application tools and components. Visual intelligence technology can help with this by sampling your code and then breaking down its functionality into transformation categories.

For instance, these days, you’d never write a custom-reporting application, even in a modern language. For a fraction of the cost, you can deploy an off-the-shelf reporting tool with all the features you need. The same is true of enterprise application integration (EAI) components and ETL (extract, transform, load) database programming tools. Even code that remains handwritten will shrink when built upon frameworks such as J2EE and .Net .

Visual intelligence technology can also apply social-networking science to analyze the relationships between modules of source code. By studying the connections, it can point out highly similar clusters of code. In the image below, each dot represents a module. Each line between the modules represents duplicate code that’s shared by the modules. Understanding these relationships is critical when devising a transformation strategy. Otherwise, it is difficult to achieve economies of scope and economies of scale.

Once you have a clear picture of your legacy application code, you’re ready to develop your modernization strategy. It should take into account your business goals, IT strategy and architectural principles.

HP offers application modernization workshops and tools to help you through each stage of the process. That includes everything from initial analysis using visual intelligence technology to strategy and planning.

HP’s proprietary visual intelligence tools have helped numerous enterprises update their legacy systems. One Fortune 500 customer sought help determining what to modernize and how to do it. HP’s application experts analyzed the customer’s source code and decomposed five legacy applications spanning nine development languages. This insight allowed HP to determine the effort, schedule and resource requirements necessary for an actionable modernization plan. The strategy included not only target code cleanup but also architecture alternatives.

Watch a video to learn how HP’s visual intelligence technology can make your application modernization project less daunting. To learn more about how HP can help, request an HP Applications Modernization Workshop.

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