Last weekend I ventured down to Melbourne to attend Cogent Consulting’s Design Improvement workshop at the Northcote Town Hall. It’s the first time Cogent has offered this workshop as a public course. It’s great value, a few hundred dollars, for what would normally be a $500+ a day, for a weekday course at a CBD venue.
I thing that the course brought home to me, is the gap between current best practice and mainframe COBOL. I understood the gap conceptually, the workshop made the gap much more concrete.
The gap has two roots.
1. The nature of COBOL, its global memory model, granularity (particularly regarding testing) etc.
2. Lack of active tool development on mainframe environments for over 20 years.
A primary tool for ongoing design improvement is refacturing. That is, modifying internal design, without changing the codes external behavior.
Why send time/money without added functionality? To bring out new abstraction that lead to more elegant solutions. These new refactured objects/concept make it easier and cheaper to test and easier, faster and cheaper to extend.
It's ongoing maintanence, it extends the life of the system and reduces the total lifecycle cost/annum. It reduces the number and size (cost not being linear to increasing size) of major revamps!
Gnoll110
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment