Approaches to upgrading your applications

There are different approaches to upgrading existing mainframe applications to Enterprise Developer in order to modernize them.

Starting over and rewriting your application in Enterprise Developer is not recommended as this means more costs, the need to do more testing and, potentially, incurs more risks.

You can keep the existing application intact and only create new front ends in Enterprise Developer that will interact with the application.

Or, and this might be the best approach and lower risk one in most situations, is to upgrade your applications and processes using incremental steps. In order to reduce the maintenance backlog and ensure that the applications have the flexibility and agility that the business needs. Using this approach:

• You upgrade your application one small step at a time, testing the change and planning for the next one on each phase.
• Start by only moving a small subset of the files in Enterprise Developer. This could mean only a small number of the people on your teams are involved with making the changes.
• Maintain the application using both Enterprise Developer and Mainframe Express.