NGSET : Changing the way Software is developed

One of the critical success factors for organization in the XXIst century will be their ability to manage software technologies. Given the budgets allocated to development and operations of software, it is essential that the resulting applications are stable long enough to justify the development cost. Conversely, the business pace requires greater and ever growing flexibility.

These apparently contradictory requirements of flexibility and durability demand changes in software development and maintenance processes to provide:

Migrations to Year 2000 and to the Euro have revealed the increasing difficulty to efficiently manage applications. The problem mainly arises from:

One Trillion Lines of Code

The programs that, over the last 35 years, have been running industrial enterprises, financial institutions, insurance groups, telecommunications and government agencies, have been written in a wide variety of computer languages and they operate on dozens of different computer platforms.
Every year billions of lines of Cobol are written or rewritten and every day more than a trillion lines of Code are processed by organizations.
The cost of this formidable activity is estimated at $4,000 billion.
And on the eve of the 3rd Millenium, the huge number of programs that run the most important systems in the world are maintained manually!

The software industry is still at a stage where software is developed and maintained manually - a true paradox for an industry dedicated to the automation of other industries!

What is astounding is that the theories, techniques and technologies needed to automate software development are complete, in place, and can be readily put to use!

To build its expertise, NGSET has followed the bottom-up automation model which has proven to be successful in other industries: Studying the real problems at workshop level and progressively developing fulfilling the needs of software professional in their daily tasks.

NGSET designs and runs industrial production lines for automated development and maintenance of software, allowing its customers to outsource selected portions of their development work. Customers take advantage of NGSET's methods and rapidly obtain results without disturbing current operations - at no risk.

NGSET's fundamental technical approach is based on eliminating or least minimizing the constraints imposed by the existing programs which were designed and written in languages not prone to automatic transformations. Therefore, NGSET translates original texts using modern technologies to structures better adapted to automatic processing.

The source code consists of all components (Cobol, JCL, SQL…) manually developed and maintained in specialized grammars.

This structural evolution is achieved using techniques of Redocumentation, Transformation and Design Recovery, without stopping the current operations and without loosing any function in the existing source.

The quality of the software is determined by the quality of the development process.