While modern business software solutions unlock organizational efficiencies, agility and the ability to deliver new value to customers, such tools were not available when applications deployed on mainframe systems were being developed.
Today, many of the Fortune 500 companies, the world’s largest banks and insurance companies and several of the largest retailers in the U.S. continue to rely on legacy programming languages, such as COBOL or Java, to power their applications. However, with new languages coming on the scene and experienced programmers in legacy languages exiting the workforce, organizations find themselves in an increasingly difficult spot.
Is it a Coding Skills Shortage or a Knowledge Gap?
As proficient programmers retire or move on, organizations across industries are recognizing they no longer have the specialized domain knowledge of the industry and institution to effectively maintain and support their complex critical systems. To combat what is perceived as a skills shortage, organizations are sinking a significant amount of effort into hiring new developers, teaching them to write in the legacy languages and tasking them with changing enterprise systems.
Modernizing applications, databases and systems that run well in their current state can be risky and expensive, so building on top of and around existing code can be the better choice. But such workarounds are not always completed in the most appropriate manner. For example, when a developer is cutting and pasting large chunks of code just to change one behavior, the end result is often awkward and unmanageable applications that even the most accomplished developers struggle to deconstruct and understand.
Understanding the code is not enough. Developers have to know what an application actually does, but if they don’t recognize how altering code in one part of a system impacts another part, the consequences can be devastating. As such, the challenge is not a skills problem — most programming languages are straightforward enough to learn — it’s a knowledge problem that exists across programming languages.
Goodbye, Years of Language-Specific Experience. Hello, AI.
The programmers who wrote all those billions of lines of code are still running mission-critical applications, but they are increasingly aging out of the workforce or opting for a new or different career path. This results in legacy systems being less well-understood by the companies that rely on them every day. While many programming languages are meant to be easy to read and understand, unknotting the program logic frequently devolves into a tedious reverse-engineering project in which developers are attempting to unearth the intent of previous developers encoded in the software.
Rather than relying on aging subject-matter experts to pass along that specialized knowledge to programmers fresh out of college (who are in short supply anyway), organizations might consider leveraging advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools to automate the process of identifying the specific code that requires attention — no matter how entangled that code is throughout the system.
While AI can be used to help with the syntactical issues of writing code (much like the Smart Compose feature leverages machine learning to “look ahead” and offer suggestions as you type), the impact of such tools is minimal. AI’s greatest time-saving opportunity lies in automating developers’ steps when conceptualizing and writing code. Whatever the reason — be it poor documentation or spaghetti code — developers spend about 75% of their time in search of the source code that needs to be changed. That source code is likely to be interspersed throughout the code repository, requiring a developer to “think through” what the code does, at nearly every step, to trace out the code detailing the behavior that they seek to modify.
How AI Overcomes the Inadequacies of Automated Testing
The goal of many organizations is making changes to systems running older programming languages as safely and efficiently as possible. Some organizations are turning to DevOps to improve agility and accuracy without sacrificing their existing mainframe system’s stability and performance. When it comes to COBOL code, where the problem is more acute than in other languages, automated testing in the CI/CD pipeline is inherently inadequate.
Once a developer has identified the code representing a behavior that needs to be changed, they’re in a position, in that automated pipeline, to ensure that the corrected behavior never changes. However, because the code describing the behavior in question can be spread throughout the system, a developer will make a change believing they haven’t altered any other behavior, but they may have actually ‘broken the world.’ System-breaking changes can be made to the code -and stay hidden – because testing may not cover scenarios that the developer didn’t consider. Well-constructed automated test suites are data-dependent, but assembling all of the data necessary to get 100% code coverage is, unfortunately, next to impossible.
If, for example, the application required a security or regulatory change, a developer might think that their correction will be covered by the automated test suite when it’s not. Without copious data in the suite, developers cannot guarantee that a behavior will never be altered. With AI “reimagining” computation as conceptual, developers are able to validate that they haven’t broken the system before they compile or check-in the code — or even run it in debug mode to check it — before running the automated test suite. Once developers are confident their change is isolated, the “conceptual check” of the behavior may be leveraged in the CI/CD pipeline, thereby ensuring the behavior remains intact from that point forward.
In short, advanced AI makes developers’ lives easier because AI can automatically analyze source code and understand the human intent behind it. Now, developers can collaborate with AI to locate source code in an effortless manner, quickly perform comprehensive impact analysis and make the necessary change(s) without ‘breaking the world.’ The improved productivity and efficiency AI unlocks is critical in maintaining and improving the important legacy and mainframe systems that handle tens of billions of business transactions every single day.
