We have a solution for this: we substantially reduce the cost of testing and virtually eliminate project risk through the use of our Test Harness 2000 product and associated methodology. See Automating Migration Testing: Test Harness 2000 for a summary explanation in PowerPoint form.

If you are new to the issues and if you want to explore them in depth, we have a white paper on both conventional and automated approaches to migration testing.  See Migration Testing.

Company Profile

2000 Technologies Corporation created the only software testing system able to prove analytically that a program was Year 2000 compliant - Test Harness 2000.  Since Y2K, we have extended the Test Harness to support various categories of projects implementing a mass change to a library of source code, often referred to as migration or conversion projects.  These categories include:

• Language migrations, such as ADSO, CSP, IDEAL, Natural, or Pacbase to COBOL;
• Database conversions, such as VSAM, Datacom , IDMS or IMS to SQL;
• Re-platforming projects, such as mainframe or AS/400 to Intel (Windows or Linux), to mainframe Linux, or Unix; and
• Re-structuring projects, which eliminate spaghetti code to reduce the cost of program maintenance.

By 100% automating the testing of all business logic and all I/O capabilities, we can cut the cost of a project by 1/3 or more.  The benefit to a client company is obvious, but the benefit is even greater for the vendor of the migration services.

The vendor of any migration service, and particularly of an automated migration, has significant costs in discovering, diagnosing and correcting any errors or omissions in the definition of the transformations being applied to the client's library of source code.  More subtly, as faulty programs are produced and delivered to the client for testing, it can be several weeks or longer before a problem is found, diagnosed, and a solution implemented.  In that time, 100's of other programs are produced, many with the same problem. 

By allowing the vendor to run the unit tests remotely in a controlled environment, these problems are identified before the code is shipped to the client.  Problems are also diagnosed by the Test Harness at the same time they are identified, allowing solutions to be crafted immediately and the problems fixed before the client sees them. 

This not only reduces the costs to the client, of testing and then re-testing faulty code, but by reducing the testing cycle from weeks to hours, faults can be fixed once as a class rather than fixing each instance of a fault.  By identifying the source of the problem early in the production cycle, the automated conversion system can be modified to generate corrected code and the programs re-converted. Therefore, there will be dramatically fewer problems to find and fix, which not only further cuts costs but reduces the whole length of the project, advancing the date at which the vendor completes the project and the date at which business benefits start to accrue to the client.

Test Harness 2000 is available to clients as part of a service to test programs being delivered as part of a migration, and it is available to vendors to integrate with their program modification procedures.  In general, it is a sufficiently specialized form of testing that, for a single project, it is not worth an end user climbing the learning curve of how to use it effectively. 

Test Harness 2000 is one implementation of our more general Source Code Instrumentation System (SCIS). SCIS has been used for a variety of special projects.  For example, we have used it to create standalone test coverage analysis logic, to monitor the amount of CPU time used in a given paragraph within an executing program, to monitor the elapsed time for each SQL command within a program, and to create an extended set of instructions to simplify the handling of XML within a program.  During Y2K, we used it to implement a Y2K fix using the data encapsulation methodology.  SCIS can be used to insert any set of source code that needs to be added to a library of source code in a highly controlled manner.

Contact Information

Telephone

+303-795-1992

Postal address

2000 Technologies Corporation

679 West Littleton Blvd.
Suite 200
Littleton, CO 80120

 

Electronic mail

General Information: "info" at "2000technologies.com"
Sales: "sales" at "2000technologies.com"
Webmaster: "webmaster" at "2000technologies.com"