CompoSys : The possible missions in modernising complex IT systems

"Nearly 75 % of the very large IT applications throughout the world never go into production or are completely outdated, either from a technological point of view or because the functional aspects do not meet user requirements any longer, when the project gets finalised, generally very late relative to the initial schedule."

This results from several world-wide overviews that have been conducted during the last ten years by the STANDISH Group.

For more than 30 years IT development has been characterised by an important application backlog. For a long while looking for integrated solutions appeared as the panacea, and even now integration remains a vital aspect in the IT world. Unfortunately integration is too often a synonym for the inability to change, and continuous change is nowadays more than ever inherent to all the developments of nearly every company and every application.

Developing agile solutions that are ready for being integrated and easy to change, if necessary, is the main aim of CompoSys. We have been constantly working for years on methodologies and tools that are inline with these objectives : a model driven development scheme, the creation of new applications from a catalogue of software components, a service oriented approach for seamlessly integrating the existing programs and finally a high level of automation for the complex conversion of legacy COBOL applications.

These various algorithms and schemes have been validated for nearly all the deployment environments that are currently in use in the major IT projects.

In this context the mission that CompoSys can undertake for its customers or prospects may involve one or several of the following aspects :

  • Fully execute a turnkey project implementing a new application with “agile” development methodologies
  • Making a complete requirements analysis using the Unified Modeling Language, then transitioning from the UML schemes to the specifications, that must be implemented either as CBD software components or as SOA services
  • Demonstrating the opportunities for using a Model Driven Environment (MDE) that will guarantee the separation of the business aspects from the technological development constraints
  • Contributing to the deployment of a Business Service Bus (BSB) with, in particular, a precise description of the composing services
  • Defining, for new developments or existing legacy applications, a Service Oriented Architecture
  • Establishing a scheme with a certain number of clearly defined steps in order to incrementally establish the Service Portfolio for the company
  • Transferring legacy applications, written in COBOL, to modern IT environments, using highly automated conversion schemes
  • Rapidly prototyping the various concepts that have been mentioned in order to demonstrate the validity of the recommended methodologies and tools.