May 19, 2022

Combining developer knowledge with artificial intelligence to improve software maintenance

Enterprise software systems are complex and require specialized abilities and unique knowledge to update, add new features, and generally solve problems. They necessitate ongoing systems maintenance to grow and evolve, which costs your organization a significant amount of money – generally about three-quarters of your IT software budget. Unfortunately, because of the global software developer shortage, the typically brief developer average tenure at one job, and today’s inadequate source-code search tools, linters, and static and dynamic analysis tools, organizations across industries are struggling to maintain their software systems effectively.

Phase Change President Steve Brothers recently wrote an article for The Next Tech about how a novel approach to artificial intelligence (AI) software tools can help enterprises save a significant amount of time and money while minimizing the risks associated with making changes in complex software systems. The article, "Combining developer knowledge with artificial intelligence to improve software maintenance," discusses how AI and cognitive automation can automate the identification of the specific lines of code that require attention — no matter how entwined throughout the system that code might be – at machine speed. The tools also comprehend and reveal all of the upstream and downstream changes that will occur due to code modifications so developers can be confident when updating source code to add new features, fix bugs, meet regulatory requirements, and address information security concerns.

Read the entire article here.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

February 16, 2022

How banks should leverage the power of automation

Mainframes are widely considered the backbones of many global financial services firms because they deliver unparalleled security, stability, and processing power. From credit card payments and ATM transactions to loans and mortgages, mainframes are relied on by 44 of the top 50 banks to host core applications that deliver secure experiences based on real-time data analytics.

Phase Change President Steve Brothers recently penned an article for TechBullion.com titled, "Banking automation: How banks should leverage the power of automation," in which he examines how these critical mainframes systems also present modernization challenges.

Mainframe systems are complicated and require meticulous processes to continue providing core operational value. While they are fully capable of running newer applications and systems to create new products and revenue streams, their ongoing support and modernization are challenging.

Brothers believes automation and artificial intelligence (AI) could greatly assist banking firms in maintaining and enhancing their mainframes because the key to sustaining these systems is precisely identifying the functionality created by the source code that is intertwined throughout the system — and changing that behavior without unintended consequences. Using a new AI approach that's designed to sift through large quantities of code in the same way humans do, AI-powered tools can aid developers in their frequent search through the deluge of code to rapidly identify where they need to make a change.

Read the entire article here.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

February 7, 2022

AI Powers the Future of Financial Services — Just Not in the Ways You Think

Phase Change President Steve Brothers was recently interviewed for an article in The Fintech Times that considers the role AI could soon play in the financial industry. The article, "Phase Change: AI Powers the Future of Financial Services — Just Not in the Ways You Think," examines how AI will help maintain the software that runs the global financial enterprises, as well as other mainframe-based industries.

AI is already utilized by financial-industry players to automate investments, insurance, trading, banking services, and risk management, primarily on mainframes originally developed in the 1960s. Mainframe computing systems provide high security; high-speed, high-volume transaction processing; and reliable uptime. However, they can be complicated to use and require constant maintenance. Plus, they struggle to evolve quickly enough to support the increasing number of banking services supported by cloud mobility and big data.

New AI technologies can soon be used to automate software maintenance by helping developers better comprehend the source code — and make changes rapidly and precisely. The programmers that developed and maintained these huge and complex systems are in high demand (and are paid like it) or aging out of the workforce, and the financial institutions that rely on them are scrambling to understand the codebases with less experienced developers.

Rather than relying on knowledge transfer protocols to pass along specialized domain and program knowledge, financial institutions can now deploy advanced AI-powered tools to automate the process of identifying specific code that requires attention, regardless of how entangled that code is throughout the system.

Read the entire article here.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

February 24, 2021

Legacy system failures expose the application knowledge gap’s harmful risks

February 24, 2021

by Steve Brothers

Government system failures during the rush to provide public benefits to alleviate the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic publicly exposed the mainframe knowledge crisis that also threatens financial institutions, healthcare providers, and many other organizations foundational to the world economy.

Several states discovered the knowledge-gap’s potentially devastating consequences when waves of unemployment-claims poured into their systems as COVID-19 ravaged the economy in early 2020. The states’ unemployment computer systems crashed trying to process the deluge of claims using mainframes and decades-old programming languages.

But it wasn’t the mainframes or the legacy programming languages that failed, despite what you may have read. It was the lack of available expert programmers necessary to maintain and update these systems to handle the voluminous claims.

According to The Verge’s article, “Unemployment checks are being held up by a coding language almost nobody knows,” Colorado employed exactly one full-time programmer to maintain the state’s COBOL system prior to the pandemic. Back then, Colorado processed roughly 2,000 unemployment claims per week. In March and April 2020, that number rocketed to as high as 104,572 claims per week.

Now governments, non-profits, and private organizations are reviewing their systems’ strategies to learn from these mistakes. If your business relies on legacy systems, you probably should keep reading – and schedule some time with your IT people.

Mainframes are cornerstones

Legacy mainframe systems and software bedrock many of our most trusted institutions, including government services, finance and banking, healthcare, and insurance. In a substantial number of cases the expert developers that created and maintained these systems and software are retiring without a supporting workforce to replace them.

Besides the people that make your business run, your software is potentially the most important resource your organization has. Internal applications likely drive your employees' capabilities and productivity. Customer-facing programs attract new customers, close business deals, and increase revenue. New applications and features can open new markets and opportunities.

To maintain and improve your critical applications, your software team relies on individual engineers that developed an expert understanding of your programs through years of experience. They know the applications and all the accumulated system changes and challenges.

When those experienced engineers depart your business, the developers that replace them must acquire the same application knowledge through training, mentorship, and on-the-job programming. This exercise introduces several material business risks.

Learning on the job

Developers new to software applications typically require 6-12 months of on-the-job learning to become productive, depending on the size of the source code base. To become proficient, programmers may need up to 3 years.

Without qualified software developers knowledgeable about your applications, you endanger your business's operations, reputation, and security. You also risk a significant decrease in your software teams' productivity and efficiency.

Consider the monumental task confronting newly hired or transferred IRS developers last March. Congress passed the CARES Act on March 25, 2020, and then Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that individual stimulus checks would be mailed in early April.

To assist with the delivery of economic stimulus payments, the new developers were required to immediately start working with the agency's source code base, which, in 2019, was estimated at nearly 20 million lines of code and includes over 60 years of legislative and system changes. As of mid-May 2020, nearly 20 million people had not received their stimulus checks, and some recipients had problems throughout the year.

These engineers didn’t have 6-12 months to become productive. They had to hit the ground running on day one. And without the benefit of weeks or months of training and on-the-job learning, they didn’t have the application knowledge necessary to understand how even simple changes could affect entire applications.

And let's not forget the productivity loss due to the remaining IRS's experienced engineers for training, mentoring, and supervising the new recruits.

What’s your risk?

Your situation may not be as dire as what the IRS faced – for now. But how much time can you really give your new developers to learn the system, and how much productivity can you afford to lose while your experienced programmers train and supervise them?

How much do you trust the developers that have just started working on your critical applications?

How confident will you be when your CEO or Board of Directors asks for assurances that the next customer-facing application update will not result in outages and lost revenue – especially if the update was programmed by a developer you hired just weeks ago?

Your software is a critical part of your organization, especially if you rely on legacy mainframe systems. You must have a plan or tool that keeps the code running and bridges the gap between retiring and departing developers and the people that will replace them.

Steve Brothers is the President of Phase Change Software. You can reach him on LinkedIn or at [email protected].

February 11, 2019

Phase Change CEO Steve Bucuvalas featured on the InfluenceNow! podcast

February 7, 2019

by Todd Erickson1

Phase Change’s Inventor, Founder, and CEO, Steve Bucuvalas, was featured in the January 31, 2019, episode of the InfluenceNow! podcast, hosted by Justin Craft2.

The InfluenceNow! podcast highlights startups, exceptional business influencers, and ideas from a variety of industries that influence the world.

Steve and Justin discussed how Phase Change and the technology behind Mia, the first cognitive agent for software development, became a reality.

The interview begins with Steve describing his career leading technology and artificial intelligence (AI) groups in financial services and insurance companies, and his subsequent entrepreneurial career starting and selling two different companies. He tells the story of how a single conversation with the buyer of his second company led to his interest in applying AI technology to the problem of software-development productivity.

At the closing, the buyer said to me, 'What's wrong with you guys in software? AI has changed financial services extraordinarily - increased our productivity 100 times,' which is accurate. 'Why can’t you do that with your own industry?'

That moment led Steve to research the barriers to applying AI to software development, and the development of the human-centric principles that led to the creation of the Mia cognitive agent.

The podcast continues with Steve and Justin discussing why organizations that rely on applications written in the Common Business-oriented Language (COBOL) programming language are Phase Change’s first target market.

COBOL is this 40-50 year-old language that has atrocious legacy problems. Because the code has been around [so long], it runs 85% of the world’s financial transactions and [there’s] 220 billion lines of [active COBOL] code. The programmers are all in their 60’s and they all want to retire, but they keep getting incentives to work a few more years because no one wants to learn COBOL. In fact, some of the kids in computer science [college courses] have never heard of it.

Justin and Steve conclude the interview discussing the productivity gains realized by Mia and Phase Change’s technology, and when it will be generally available.

To learn more about how Steve and Phase Change Software will radically improve software productivity, watch the podcast video below or listen to the audio podcast.


1Todd Erickson is a tech writer with Phase Change Software. You can reach him at [email protected].
2Justin Craft is the Founder and CEO of Cast Influence, a Denver, Colorado,-based turnkey marketing agency. Phase Change Software is a client of Cast Influence.

December 19, 2018

Phase Change unveils COBOL Colleague product website

December 18, 2018

by Todd Erickson

Phase Change announces the launch of its initial product website – CodeCatalyst.ai. The website will support the company's market entry product, COBOL Colleague, the first cognitive tool for software development, by targeting organizations that rely on COBOL-based applications for critical business operations.

The CodeCatalyst.ai website details how COBOL Colleague will assist COBOL reliant organizations with their unique issues, such as a vanishing workforce, lost application knowledge, and lagging productivity.

COBOL Colleague reads-in the source code, extracts the embedded concepts, discovers the dependencies, reveals the buried knowledge, and becomes an expert that never tires and never leaves.

Natural-language-interaction enables developers and stakeholders with limited COBOL experience to collaborate with the cognitive agent and work productively with their COBOL applications.

Find bugs and dead code in seconds, not minutes or hours. Make changes with full knowledge of the downstream impact. Confidently add new features, products, and services. Empower anyone with a basic understanding of COBOL to interact and engage with your COBOL applications.

Everything you dreamed of in COBOL-based environments is now a reality. Visit CodeCatalyst.ai.

Todd Erickson is a tech writer with Phase Change Software. You can reach him at [email protected].

October 30, 2018

COBOL is dead! Long live COBOL!
A living collection of COBOL articles

updated March 16, 2021

by Todd Erickson

To stay up-to-date with the latest news and commentary surrounding COBOL-based applications, we track and archive COBOL-related online articles. Below is our current collection of stories, which we try to update frequently.

Despite its age and multiple reports of its impended death, the Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL) remains responsible for a large portion of the world’s daily financial transactions – credible estimates include as much as $3 trillion per day and roughly 90 percent of all ATM and in-person financial transactions.

COBOL was first published in January 1960 by the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASLY), who based it on the first compiler developed by Admiral Grace Hopper and her team at Remington Rand in 1952. It’s designed to develop portable business applications that could be run on systems developed by multiple manufacturers.

It remains vital to the world’s financial systems because of its simplicity and reliability.

One measure of its importance is the number of news and commentary articles published in reliable industry sources that repeat a common theme, namely that the programming language is ancient, nobody wants to use it, but it’s so vital to the financial and government sectors that it won’t go away – COBOL is dead! Long live COBOL!

Once or twice a year a new piece pops up and we typically pass it around the office, discuss new information or opinions it reveals, and archive it.

Recently, one of our shrewd colleagues suggested we post links to these articles here on our website so others in the small but influential COBOL community can reference them.

So we did. We’ll update this page when we discover new COBOL media pieces. If we’ve missed something important, email [email protected].

Long live COBOL!

Articles

2020
Title Date Author Snippet
The code that controls your money November 10, 2020 Clive Thompson
Tech Journalist
COBOL underpins the world's financial systems, and it's not going away soon.
Why the Government Is Desperate for Programmers Who Know This Old Language April 9, 2020 Caroline Delbert
Popular Mechanics
As the U.S. grapples with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, government agencies with aging systems are clammering for COBOL developers.
A lazy fix 20 years ago means the Y2K bug is taking down computers now January 7, 2020 Chris Stokel-Walker
New Scientist.com
A quick but lazy fix to the Y2K bug is now putting the same systems in danger.
2019
Title Date Author Snippet
How COBOL still powers the global economy at 60 years old may 23, 2019 Paul Flahive
Texas Public radio
Financial institutions continue to rely on COBOL code, but will new training programs be enough to replace the retiring workforce?
SHARE: GAO’s Mainframe Risk Claims Debunked May 9, 2019 SHARE'D Intelligence The 2018 GAO Report that says government systems are at significant risk due to their reliance on legacy programming languages is nonsense. Evolving architecture is always bridging the gap between older and modern applications.
2018
Title Date Author Snippet
Quartz Obsession: COBOL June 28, 2018 Justin Sablich What's going to happen when all the Baby-Boomer COBOL developers retire?
In digital transformation top banks are leading April 3, 2018 Tom Groenfeldt Instead of ripping and replacing legacy systems and code, which can be prohibitively expensive and time consuming, some banks are maintaining these systems and wrapping customer engagement systems around them.
It’s Cobol all the way down April 2018 Glenn Fleishman COBOL-based systems continue to run much of the world’s financial systems. But its supporting workforce is retiring and efforts to convert these applications to modern programming languages are expensive and time-consuming.
2017
Title Pub Date Author Snippet
COBOL is everywhere. Who will maintain it? May 6, 2017 David Cassel Many of the world’s financial institutions and U.S. government agencies, such as Homeland Security, Department of Veterans Affairs, and Social Security, rely on COBOL-based systems, but a shortage of programming talent and education institutions that provide programming courses is on the horizon.
Trump said government has one 40-year-old IT system. It actually has at least 10. April 12, 2017 Frank Konkel A list of 10 U.S. government computer systems that are at least 40-years old. Three of the systems run on COBOL code.
Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset April 9, 2017 Anna Irrera
Reuters.com
Organizations that rely on Cobol-based applications have a hard time replacing retiring programmers and support personnel, which has given veteran developers opportunities to continue working, even after retirement.
2016
Title Date Author Snippet
Why it’s time to learn COBOL April 1, 2016 Paul Rubens
CIO.com
Acquiring COBOL programming skills might be a wise career move. Hundreds-of-billions of lines of COBOL code are still in use and many universities have stopped offering classes in the 50+ year old language.
2015
Title Date Author Snippet
The inevitable return of COBOL July 6, 2015 Ritika Trikha
HackerRank
The looming shortage of COBOL programmers will inevitably lead to COBOL programming once again becoming an in-demand skill set.
2014
Title Date Author Snippet
CIOs should prepare for lack of Cobol (Yes, Cobol) developers October 2, 2014 Sharon Florentine
CIO.com
While the demand for talented and skilled Cobol programmers remains steady, the programming language’s lack of popularity has shrunk the available talent pool. As the existing Cobol support workforce ages and retires, companies are resorting to novel strategies to acquire and train staff.
Cobol is dead. Long live Cobol! October 2, 2014 Gary Beach
Wall Street Journal CIO Journal blogs
CIOs that rely on Cobol-based systems keep developer staff as long as possible while others prefer new hires with multi-language capabilities over Cobol-specific or Cobol-only skills.
All the rich kids are into COBOL – but why? September 17, 2014 Matt Asay
readwrite.com
COBOL isn’t sexy or even that popular. But the basic tenants of supply and demand remain true – if there are still a lot of COBOL applications running critical systems and not a lot of programmers interested in learning the 50-year-old programming language, then brushing up on your COBOL skills might make it easier to find a job earning more money.
The government’s COBOL conundrum June 2, 2014 Nicole Blake Johnson
FedTech magazine.com
The U.S. federal government’s Office of Personnel Management released its “Strategic Information Technology Plan” for revamping the agency’s IP operations. Part of the plan discusses the office’s plans for maintaining and eventually migrating away from the roughly 60-million-lines of production COBOL code that enable the agency to meet a number of its regulatory requirements.
2012
Title Date Author Snippet
Brain Drain: Where COBOL systems go from here May 21, 2012 Robert L. Mitchell
CIO.com
Not only does losing experienced COBOL programmers hurt many companies’ ability to maintain its mainframe systems, but it also means the loss of the programmers’ deep understanding of the business logic. A number of organizations are teaming with private businesses to educate younger programmers and team them with experienced developers before it’s too late.
Cobol brain drain: Survey results March 14, 2012 Compuworld Staff Results from the Compuworld survey on Cobol use in business and government, which showed that nearly 50 percent of respondents had operational Cobol-based systems and a large number continue to develop new business applications with Cobol.
The future of COBOL: Why it won’t go away soon – Part 2 January 11, 2012 Brian Bloom
IT World Canada
When thinking about maintaining or replacing their COBOL systems, companies must consider the employee angle. Can they continue to hire COBOL programmers when experts forecast that a major COBOL skills gap in on the horizon, and is that enough of a reason to rip and replace?
The future of COBOL: Why it won’t go away soon – Part 1 January 10, 2012 Brian Bloom
IT World Canada
COBOL-based systems will not be going away anytime soon because of the millions of invested man-hours and dollars already spent to develop these mainframe programs and the enormous predicted replacement costs. There’s also the fact that we don’t have anything better enough to make the change.
Fun

*All images are copyrighted by their respective owners

Todd Erickson is a tech writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

April 10, 2017

Prevent software application knowledge from walking out the door – blog

April 10, 2017

by Todd Erickson, Tech Writer

Brain drain is a serious problem facing organizations that use software applications to run their businesses. Learn how you can seal the drain and retain all of the knowledge trapped in your applications.

At the end of every workday, your software development teams walk out the door with all of their knowledge leaving with them. Some of them don’t come back, and that loss of information and expertise, or brain drain, is a growing business problem, especially with IT industry turnover rates hovering between 20-30% annually.

Consider how much knowledge your organization loses when key members of your development team retire or join other companies. Not only do you lose development expertise, but the knowledge your engineers have regarding how your software applications work, such as:

  • How the system is architected
  • The subject-matter expertise used to implement functionality
  • The business considerations that drove product and feature designs
  • How third-party and external systems are integrated

The plight of developing and supporting older and large-scale applications is exacerbated when companies have to scramble to replace retiring software engineers with unqualified replacements. Multiple reports suggest that 10,000 Baby Boomers walk out the corporate door in the U.S. for good every day.

Many of these retirees are the software engineers that developed and maintain the many systems that still run on Cobol and other mainframe programming languages. The impact of losing thousands of mainframe engineers and their vast programming and business knowledge will be widespread. The 240 billion lines of Cobol code running today power approximately 85 percent of all daily business transactions worldwide.

Most organizations don't have the processes in place to capture their employees' business and system intelligence before they leave for good.

It’s especially difficult for engineers. Today’s software tools don't allow them to easily convey their expertise to others – or enable developers, business managers, and executives to easily discover and utilize any previously shared knowledge.

What can you do?

You might be surprised to discover that your engineers’ domain and system knowledge already resides in one other place outside their minds – your software. While creating the code, development teams pour their organization, programming, and business intelligence into your applications.

Imagine what you could do if your organization's technical and business stakeholders had access to all of the knowledge and human intent embedded in your software applications. Imagine asking your software application how it works and having it answer you back.

How can you unlock all of that untapped knowledge?

Liberate encoded knowledge

Phase Change Software is creating AI-assistive technology that unlocks the encoded knowledge embedded in your software applications.

Our assistive AI understands your software and turns it into formal units of knowledge. In essence, software is transformed into data.

Our AI assistant will liberate your software's hidden knowledge and help it understand itself. Our natural language processing (NLP) techniques will enable your technical and business stakeholders to easily interact with applications.

You will soon be able to literally have a conversation with your software, and have it teach you its encoded programming, business, and domain knowledge.

learn more about our technology

 

 

Todd Erickson is a tech writer with Phase Change Software. You can reach him at [email protected].

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