Minnesota does more with same level of staff
The Minnesota Child Support Enforcement Division within the state’s Department of Human Services had gone through a staff restructuring and wanted a faster way to maintain and test applications without increasing the size of its staff.
The agency was looking for a more reliable, faster way to perform code analysis than the manual methods they were using. Tony Bokhorst, technical supervisor for the state, says, “At this critical time, it was simply too time-consuming with the potential for errors, to have our staff of around 50 developers go through code manually during the system impact analysis phase. We needed to find another solution.”
The agency chose Software AG’s Discovery Edition for Natural, which facilitates application modernization by providing detailed documentation and code analysis. According to Software AG, the child support division gained an understanding of Natural applications, as well as the ability to extend existing IT investments, through the use of the Natural Discovery Edition. The solution provides automated application inventory, documentation, code analysis and modification tools. Software AG reports that the Minnesota Child Support Enforcement Division has gained the following benefits from the implementation:
- will save 30 percent to 40 percent of the development time normally spent building application documentation and analysis,
- improved accuracy of analysis,
- significant time savings in analysis as well as in delivering required quality assurance documents,
- improved confidence in the analysis and in handling any changes,
- real-time application information via the IE browser,
- easier comprehension, and
- someone unfamiliar with mainframe code could now do system impact analysis.