Welcome to Revolve, the most productive tool for analyzing and maintaining your legacy applications. Revolve reduces the cost and complexity of tasks ranging from everyday bug fixes to large-scale system refurbishment, by providing programmers with powerful inventory analysis features and comprehensive source exploration tools.
Revolve analyzes your legacy application to discover its structure; the files it uses; how and where data items are used; and many other details. It stores the results of this analysis in a database, which you can interrogate through many different tools to produce diagrams, reports, and so on, to help you understand the application.
It is a knowledge management environment for both developers and central analysis teams.
Developers use it to understand, document and improve enterprise applications on a daily basis. Central analysis teams use it to estimate, assess and manage inventory-wide global change programmes.
Revolve's capabilities are used to parse all application components and populate the database with information about all applications in your system inventory. The database is a complete representation of all the objects that constitute the complete system and the inter dependencies between all the objects within the applications in the system. Revolve’s rich set of application understanding and research capabilities perform sophisticated queries against the database to present a wide range of information about the application in seconds. It is used by programmers on a daily basis to quickly understand how to implement any application change requests, the complete scope of impact of any code or data definition changes and the actual complexity and effort involved in making the change before they start implementing the change.
Revolve empowers programmers to:
Application enhancements and fixes can, therefore, be delivered in a fraction of the time while dramatically improving quality, accelerating time to market and increasing customer satisfaction.
The power of Revolve's capabilities comes from the fact that it contains an advanced language dialect parser specific to COBOL and not just a general purpose "text browser". It does offer a general purpose text browser, to analyze components written in any language, but the analysis capabilities available are not as advanced when the database has been populated via information gained from scanning source code as text, rather than parsing the source code/ dialect. The language/ dialect parsers are key to populating the database with application characteristics and interdependencies about the application code and about all the environment subsystems accessed from the code. For example, subprograms/ subroutines, screen systems, transaction systems, databases and file systems.
The language/ dialect parsers supplied support:
and the three optional language extensions enable Revolve to work with:
Revolve Enterprise Edition provides a sophisticated interface to a rich set of additional capabilities focused specifically at solving the problems centralized teams face when performing analysis and managing the implementation of changes inventory-wide. Such mass change programmes typically impact the majority of applications, programs and data sources within the IT system inventory and require a different analysis approach from that typically used by a programmer working on a specific isolated enhancement request.
These global IT change programmes, where Y2K remediation has in recent years been the most widely publicized, occur regularly, driven by business issues like:
Once such change programmes are scoped, budgeted and approved they will typically affect every programmer in the organization. However, before this happens, a central team is typically selected to organize the initial analysis inventory-wide, involve application experts as required, and coordinate the change programme throughout the organization.
This central team is usually expert in the global change requirement but not expert on all the individual applications. Revolve Enterprise Edition is designed specifically for such teams of central business/ application analysts and has extensive capabilities to help the team understand the effort and costs involved, coordinate detailed change analysis, manage the change programme inventory-wide and report on progress globally to executive management.
By empowering experts in the specific inventory-wide change issue with the specialized mass analysis and change programme implementation capabilities of Revolve Enterprise Edition, a small team can produce more accurate effort and cost estimates earlier in the planning process. The same team can then, with minimum input from applications experts, isolate the real points of impact rapidly, while ensuring quality by not inadvertently discarding positive points of impact. Finally, the central team can then use the sophisticated worksheet capabilities to manage the whole change programme from an application object's perspective to ensure all changes to user interfaces, code and data stores are made in a controlled fashion and that all inter-dependencies are tested at the appropriate time. The benefit to the business is earlier delivery of systems with the major new capabilities requested, with the quality required to enable faster time to market than the competition.
As Revolve Enterprise Edition is designed to enable a small team of individuals to accelerate the delivery of any inventory-wide change programme, the value is related more to the size of the inventory involved than to the number of users. For this reason, a part of the license may include a license for a Usage Counter related to the size of the inventory involved or an unlimited license. If you have a metered license, then to use all the capabilities across the whole application inventory, you need to 'meter' the inventory. You need a Usage Counter only to meter lines of code ready for processing with Revolve. If you are prompted to meter code and believe you should have an unlimited metering license, please contact your Sales Representative. A nominated individual in the central team handles the metering of the entire inventory, as this is a one-off task. Once the code for each application is metered, all the advanced capabilities are available for use by anyone who is licensed to use Revolve Enterprise Edition.
The major parts of Revolve are:
The Revolve desktop is the main window, with pulldown menus, through which you access the Revolve tools. Toolbars, popup menus, and various subwindows all help to make the desktop very fast to use. The desktop is sometimes called the Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
A project is where Revolve keeps a note of all the files in your application, their types, and how they are related. A project is very easy to create, and makes any processing of the application extremely quick and easy. You create a project for each application that you want to analyze.
A set of tools for analyzing source code. For example, you can locate discrepancies or targets, measure the complexity of your project, locate impacts, create coding tasks, and edit source code.
A set of browsers to supply you with information about your project components. For example, you can find where programs are called, examine copybooks, and view screens. Some browsers are for language-specific project components, like CICS, DMS, and JCL.
SourceConnect enables you to refer to files on a mainframe from your workstation, just as if the files were on a local or network drive. You need to install Revolve Enterprise Edition to use this functionality and enable mainframe source connectivity.
The three optional language extensions provided enable Revolve to work with Assembler, PL/I or Unisys COBOL.
and the major parts of Revolve Enterprise Edition are:
You use the analysis tools, with their detailed understanding of the COBOL language, to identify places in your application that are relevant to the update you're planning. These are called points of interest (POIs). The tools find points of interest such as:
You produce sets of potential points of interest by running the analysis tools. You then combine sets in various ways and run them through further tools, removing the points of interest that are not, after all, relevant to the planned update. In this way, you discard code that does not need modifying and are left with the code that does.
You can create your own tools, consisting of a sequence of tools and set manipulations that you have developed and want to use repeatedly. This is particularly useful in cases where identifying a particular type of item involves several passes through the analysis tools including set manipulation. Once you have created a composite tool, you can distribute it to others in your group for them to use.
You use the worksheet to record points of interest and any categories you assign to them, as well as any decisions or changes you make regarding them. This means that the worksheet documents the application analysis phase. From here, you can monitor progress and output a variety of reports as needed.
Revolve Enterprise Edition features are available either with an unlimited metering license, or metered on a line-of-code basis. The latter means that the code has to have been metered before you can process it through the analysis tools. Only one person needs to meter the code, and then everyone can process the code without further cost. The demonstration programs are already metered, so all you need to do is to point to the file that confirms that the code has been metered. This file is called the metering control file. If you are prompted to meter code and believe you should have an unlimited metering license, please contact your Sales Representative.
All the documentation is online. You get to it from the Windows Start menu, or from the Revolve Help menu.
Only the Getting Started book is supplied in printed form. This chapter gives an overview of Revolve, and the next chapters give brief notes on installing. The Tutorials online book contains a set of tutorials to help you get started quickly.
We assume you're familiar with COBOL, CICS and the Windows operating system you're using, but that you've never seen Revolve or any other Micro Focus software before.
You can send us comments about the documentation quickly and easily, from within the online books. To find out how, see the appendix Send Us Comments.
Copyright © 2006 Micro Focus (IP) Ltd. All rights reserved.