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This chapter introduces Revolve Enterprise Edition and its components.
To understand the architecture of the products within the whole MERANT Revolve Transformation Product Suite, please see the chapter Understanding the Revolve Transformation Product Suite in your Revolve Enterprise Edition Getting Started. This explains which features are contained within which product, and how this affects your use of the different products and options, if at all.
Revolve Enterprise Edition provides a complete desktop environment for large-scale analysis of entire applications in order to identify the changes required to enable the applications to meet major new requirements. In this book we use the term "transformation" for this process of analyzing then changing applications on a large scale.
Revolve Enterprise Edition is designed to work alongside two further MERANT products, which provide features to help you with specific transformation scenarios. These products are:
In this book we use the term "solution-specific option" for these two products.
Revolve Enterprise Edition also includes all of Revolve's facilities for small-scale analysis of applications. These are described in your Revolve User's Guide.
Before you can use any of the facilities in Revolve Enterprise Edition, you need to create a project; until you have done this, all menu options are unavailable. The facilities for creating and managing projects are available in Revolve Enterprise Edition, but they belong to the base product, Revolve; see the chapter Creating and Managing Projects in your Revolve User's Guide for further information.
Revolve Enterprise Edition provides the following facilities:
To use any of these facilities except for Investigator, first your code must be metered, that is, the lines of code that you want to work with are counted and the total is subtracted from a usage counter. Code needs to be metered just once, in Revolve Enterprise Edition. After it has been metered, it is available for analysis both in Revolve Enterprise Edition itself and in the solution-specific options. For more information about metering code, see the chapter Metering Lines of Code.
You can use Revolve Enterprise Edition either as a single user, or as part of a group. A group can share projects and worksheets and associated information such as categories. Group working enables several people to work on a large project at the same time, providing time and efficiency savings. Group working requires an administrator, who has responsibility for creating and managing the shared project, and creating the group worksheet and dividing the analysis work between the members of the group. For information about sharing projects see the chapter Administering Group Working in your Revolve User's Guide . For information about sharing worksheets and associated information see the chapter Administering Group Working in this guide.
Investigator is a tool for conducting analysis on data elements. For more information about Investigator, see the chapter Using Investigator
Revolve Enterprise Edition provides a collection of analysis tools that you use to search for elements in the project source code that are of interest in the context of your particular mass-change requirements. These are known as points of interest (POIs). Typically, each analysis tool searches for points of interest based on one specific attribute, such as the names of data items, their type and size, their values, their usage and so on. Many tools accept an input set, usually containing data items or statements, on which to work. All tools create an output set containing the points of interest that match the specified criteria, and some tools move the resulting set into the worksheet.
Sets of points of interest are displayed in a set view window. The set view enables you to perform union, intersection or subtraction operations on the POI set with POIs in other sets. Sets can be added to or subtracted from the worksheet and POIs in the worksheet can be selected to create sets.
You can customize analysis tools to suit your particular analysis requirements. You can select and combine analysis tools to form new composite tools or batch processes, then use these to introduce a degree of automation into your analysis activities.
You can share individual tools, composite tools and batch processes with others in your project group.
For more information about analysis tools and sets, see the chapter Using Enterprise Analysis Tools and Sets
The worksheet is the central store and focus for mass-change analysis work. It also keeps track of what is of interest, what has been fixed and the decisions made.
The worksheet lists the POIs, which are mainly data items, statements and data stores. Different types of POIs are shown on different tabs. The information shown for each tab varies. For example, the data items tab shows the type and size of each data item and defines the data type allocated to it, as well as who allocated the data type and when. The statements tab displays the source, its line number, the status of the fix, such as whether it is automatically generated or supplied manually, and any verification status. The worksheet can include types of POI such as SQL columns and BMS screen fields.
In the worksheet you:
You can obtain a variety of reports on the worksheet. Some of these require you to export worksheet details to Microsoft Access.
For more information about worksheets, see the chapter Using Worksheets. For more information about worksheet reports, see the chapter Worksheet Reports
Revolve Enterprise Edition includes an Estimation Engine, which you can use to estimate the effort that would be involved in implementing a particular transformation project. For more information about the Estimation Engine, see the chapter Estimating Implementation Effort.
The Revolve Enterprise Edition interfaces is like the Revolve Interface, except that there is an additional option on the menu bar, called Enterprise. The Revolve interface is described in the chapter The Interface in your Revolve User's Guide
Figure 1-1 shows the Enterprise menu.
Figure 1-1: Enterprise Menu
The Enterprise menu gives you access to the facilities provided by Revolve Enterprise Edition. On the Enterprise menu you can click:
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