March 3, 2022

Improving developer productivity on the mainframe with artificial intelligence

Mainframes are the central data repository in an organization’s data processing center. They support thousands of applications and input/output devices while simultaneously serving thousands of users. Most corporate data still lives on the mainframe, and these systems offer advanced capabilities, flexibility, security, and resilience to downtime. Unfortunately, mainframe management and modernization can be costly, risky, and can damage an organization’s reputation by crashing internal and customer-facing applications if developers don't know the system.

Phase Change President Steve Brothers recently authored an article for Techslang.com titled, "Improving Developer Productivity on the Mainframe with Artificial Intelligence," which discusses the roles mainframes play in multiple industries including finance, healthcare, and government, and the difficulties reliant organizations face maintaining and integrating them with modern tools.

To maintain and improve critical mainframe applications, software teams rely on seasoned developers who have developed an intimate understanding of their systems. Unfortunately, many of these experienced programmers are aging out of the workforce or opting for other opportunities – creating a loss of knowledge about those organizations' mainframe applications.

In the article, Brothers explains how AI can automate the process of precisely and accurately identifying code that requires attention — no matter how dispersed throughout the system it might be. By guiding these AI tools through describing the application behavior that needs to change, developers don’t have to search through and develop an intimate understanding of, massive source code bases to reveal the specific lines implementing that behavior. They can now collaborate with an artificially intelligent coworker to augment their own intelligence and be guided exactly to the code that matters.

Read the entire article here.

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

February 23, 2022

You can use artificial intelligence to fix your broken code

Mainframe systems are used across industries and around the globe, with over 10,000 currently in worldwide use. They are relied on by some of our most important institutions, including 96 of the world’s 100 largest banks, nine out of 10 of the world's biggest insurance companies, 23 of the 25 largest U.S. retailers, and 71 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Unfortunately, often because of a lack of detailed understanding of these mainframe systems, making source-code changes can be costly, risky, and can tarnish the organizations' reputations.

Phase Change President Steve Brothers recently wrote an article for BuiltIn.com titled, "You Can Use Artificial Intelligence to Fix Your Broken Code," which explains how artificial intelligence (AI) can help developers better understand the codebase, and help them find code responsible for application behavior at machine speed. Developers will no longer have to pore over millions of lines of code to unearth the intent of previous developers and find the source code that requires change.

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].

January 25, 2022

How AI can improve software development

Transforming business operations is a constant need, and the pandemic-prompted emphasis on modernizing legacy computing systems has forced organizations across industries to accelerate their modernization plans. The problem with mainframe modernization, however, is that today’s code search tools, linters, and program analysis tools are deficient when it comes to mitigating the risks associated with improving and even simply maintaining legacy systems.

Phase Change President Steve Brothers recently authored a contributed article for DevOps.com about how artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help developers work more productively and decrease the risks associated with legacy system modernization and maintenance.

The article, "How AI Can Improve Software Development," explains how today's bug localization, code visualization, and error detection tools don't actually identify specific lines of code that require change. And, once the code is identified, developers are still required to build mental models of their applications to make sure any source code changes don't make even more bugs or crash the entire system.

Through intelligence augmentation, AI can automate the identification of specific lines of code that require change – developers simply ask the AI-driven knowledge repository where unwanted behaviors are coming from, and the AI quickly identifies the code associated with that behavior. Also, before the developers compile or check in the new code, the AI can forward simulate the changes and validate that they won't create more problems or break the system.

Read the entire article here.

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

July 20, 2021

IEEE conference accepts paper co-authored by Phase Change scientists

The International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME) 2021 accepted a technical paper authored by current and former Phase Change research scientists for presentation at its 37th annual event in Luxembourg City, Great Duchy of Luxembourg, September 27 - October 1.

The paper, "Contemporary COBOL: Developers' Perspectives on Defects and Defect Location," was co-authored by current Phase Change Senior Research Scientist Rahul Pandita, former Senior Research Scientist Aleksander Chakarov, and former intern Agnieszka Ciborowska.

The authors' goal is to direct the attention of researchers and practitioners towards investigating and addressing challenges associated with mainframe software development. More specifically, they present results from surveys of COBOL and more modern programming languages regarding defects and defect-location strategies. Software development has made substantial advances in software maintenance for modern programming languages but mainframe programming languages receive limited attention.

Meanwhile, mainframe systems are facing a critical shortage of experienced developers as the current generation retires. Without extensive mainframe and application-specific experience, replacement developers face significant difficulties, even during routine maintenance tasks such as code comprehension and defect location.

ICSME is an annual event sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to present, discuss, and debate the most recent ideas, experiences, and challenges in software maintenance and evolution. This year's conference will be a virtual event.

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

May 25, 2021

Leveraging AI to close the application knowledge gap

May 25, 2021

by Todd Erickson

Although the modern enterprise moves quickly to adopt and support helpful new technologies, most organizations must continue to rely on their legacy systems for core functions. Legacy applications struggle to evolve fast enough to support shifting and evolving organization demands. The companies frequently try alternate strategies to keep pace, such as building on top of existing applications or moving them to other platforms, but these approaches only complicate another risk -- the software developer shortage.

On May 19, BetaNews.com published the article, "Leveraging AI to close the application knowledge gap," which was written by Phase Change President Steve Brothers. The story explains how the software-developer shortage forces many companies to work around legacy applications when they lose the expert developers that built and maintained them, and how those word-arounds can produce disastrous results for the organizations' bottom lines and reputations.

Steve also describes how artificial intelligence (AI) can reinterpret what source-code computations represent and convert them into concepts so developers no longer have to research and discern the original developers' intent. This enables new developers to quickly understand the applications' behaviors, and with that knowledge, the AI can quickly guide developers to the precise area of code where changes need to be made.

Read the full story here.

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

April 9, 2021

Phase Change President: Creative & focused AI needed to help COBOL skills shortage

The so-called "COBOL Skills Shortage" is compelling many organizations to impetuously hire and train programmers to maintain, support, and attempt to modernize their COBOL systems.
But understanding how to write COBOL is not enough — developers have to comprehend what an application actually does and how code changes can impact the system as a whole to avoid critical missteps. That work for those developers is cognitively difficult.

Phase Change President Steve Brothers recently wrote an article for Built In Colorado.com about how artificial intelligence (AI) can help solve the application knowledge gap problem, but only when traditional AI technology gets more creative and moves beyond understanding general business knowledge and instead learns specialized industry and institutional domain knowledge.

AI & software development

AI can help solve the application knowledge gap dilemma, but popular contemporary AI approaches are insufficient. Some AI tools can help with the syntax of writing code, but these remedies only provide incremental value.

Developers spend nearly 75 percent of their time finding the area in the source code in which they need to make a change because understanding code in these large complex systems is difficult and time-consuming.

AI will emerge as a paradigm-changing technology when it can understand code intent and “reimagine” computation into concepts, thereby doing what a developer does when they code — but at machine speed.

Read Steve’s entire Built In Colorado article at https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/cobol-skills-shortage.

October 23, 2020

Modernize your mainframe instead of migrating away for higher customer and company satisfaction says IDC study

October 23, 2020

by Todd Erickson

Modernizing your IBM mainframe instead of migrating off the platform leads to higher customer and company satisfaction says and IDC study of 440 organizations in Australia, India, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Commissioned by Rocket Software, a legacy infrastructure consulting firm, the study as reported by IT Jungle found that IBM shops that modernized their IBM mainframe infrastructure instead of migrating to more modern platforms were more satisfied across a number of metrics before and after the projects.

The shops that modernized reported higher satisfaction than the shops than migrated across the following 7 metrics:

(1) customer experience;
(2) overall performance;
(3) security, availability, and disaster recovery capabilities;
(4) agility, microservices, and DevOps;
(5) ease of finding talent;
(6) ability to incorporate AI and IoT;
(7) and API, mobile, and Web enablement.

According to the study report, in addition to seeing higher satisfaction ratings, the organizations that modernized generally reported paying less on hardware, software, and staffing.

The study seems to dispel the common IT industry myth that mainframe platforms are less capable than more modern systems simply because of their age.

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

May 28, 2020

Can AI solve the engineer shortage?

May 30, 2020

by Todd Erickson

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed workforce shortages in a number of industries, including healthcare, food retail, and cybersecurity.

The related financial crisis and government financial assistance requests have also demonstrated a critical need for legacy system developers. The recent performance issues experienced by these financial assistance programs have exposed how dependent our financial and public infrastructure are on legacy and mainframe systems.

Phase Change COO Steve Brothers recently penned an article for ColoradoBiz Magazine about how the legacy application skills shortage threatens the software that underpins a great deal of the world's large financial and government systems.

He also talks about how artificial intelligence (AI) can be extremely effective in helping legacy application maintenance and development by introducing automation into the process, improving project management efficiencies, and by shortening the steep training curve typically experienced by developers new to these systems.

Learn more about how the improved productivity and efficiency AI brings to software development could be instrumental in maintaining and improving our critical legacy and mainframe systems.

Can AI solve the engineer shortage?
by Steve Brothers
ColoradoBiz magazine
May 15, 2020

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

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

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