Northrop Grumman Information Technologies (NGIT)

Reliability & Maintainability Information System (REMIS)

Tandem COBOL85 and Tandem SQL to C++ and Oracle9i

History: The Reliability & Maintainability Information System (REMIS) is a key component of the Air Force Depot Maintenance System. Consisting of 3.1 million lines of source COBOL and C code, the system runs on a Tandem Symmetric Multiprocessor with a Tandem database. Northrop Grumman IT (NGIT) maintained REMIS at Wright-Patterson AFB. NGIT contracted with TSRI and undertook Increment-1 of the REMIS migration to demonstrate the benefits of their automated transformation technologies.

Challenges: NGIT manually converted the existing REMIS presentation layer into web-enabled pages. TSRI used its automated technology to convert the existing REMIS database access layer COBOL code into object oriented C++. The technical effort provided by TSRI included a four-phase code conversion process, consisting of automated assessment, automated transformation, automated re-factoring, and semi-automated re-factoring. The assessment phase generated HTML documentation for roughly 300,000 lines of COBOL. The fully automated transformation phase included transforming COBOL to C++ and transforming embedded Tandem SQL into Oracle SQL. The fully automated re-factoring phase consolidated "identical" code and eliminated "dead" code. Semi-automated re-factoring involved "similar" code reduction, where NGIT engineers participated in defining re-factoring specifications through a remote interface into TSRI's operation center. Re-factoring reduced the code line count by over 30%.

Results: TSRI successfully performed the assessment, transformation and re-factoring of the 300,000 line COBOL subsystem in increment-1. NGIT was particularly pleased by the smooth delivery of both the transformed and the re-factored versions of the REMIS C++ code. After a month of acceptance testing only one flaw was detected in the transformed code. No flaws at all were found in the 200,000 lines of re-factored code. NGIT was also pleased with the strong improvements in performance and maintainability that resulted from the re-factoring process. As a result of these efforts TSRI was selected for Northrop Grumman's "2002 Small Business of the Year Award".