This chapter introduces Revolve and its components. The following chapters will provide more in-depth information on specific functionality and use.
Studies show that approximately 50% of system maintenance is spent on determining what source code modifications need to be applied to a system's files. That's half of the maintenance process! Revolve, with its sophisticated exploration and analysis facilities, can make the system maintenance process much faster and simpler. It significantly reduces the time and effort expended to make estimates, add enhancements, re-engineer, and perform daily maintenance tasks.
It 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 also includes facilities for small-scale analysis of applications.
Revolve enables you to examine the smallest details of your most complex applications. This User's Guide is designed to help you along the way. The following sections are designed to give you a broad idea of the functionality that Revolve brings to your system analysis. For details and specifics, links are provided to appropriate chapters and sections in the rest of this User's Guide.
Before you can use any of the facilities in Revolve, you need to create a project; until you have done this, all menu options are unavailable. See the chapter Creating and Managing Projects for further information.
Revolve provides the following facilities:
Revolve Enterprise Edition provides the following facilities:
To use these features, code needs to be metered. See your Sales Representative if you are not sure whether or not you need to meter your code manually.
Code needs to be metered just once, in Revolve. After it has been metered, it is available for analysis in Revolve. For more information about metering code, see the chapter Metering Lines of Code.
Revolve provides a series of information browsers, each of which displays detailed information about a particular type or class of object in the source code. For example, the Variables information browser shows all the places where a variable is referenced or modified in the source code. These browsers provide an interactive, dynamic method for locating information in the database, thus simplifying source code exploration. With information browsers, you can quickly cross-reference where objects are used throughout an entire application.
Revolve includes many tools to manipulate and explore source code. These tools can be used in conjunction with the information browsers as well as with other tools to provide you with dynamic and flexible source code analysis and control.
Graphical diagrams are created at various levels to illustrate associations between components in a project. For example, the relationship between copy files and mainline program files is easily created and analyzed by use of graphical representations of your project. The Split Screen Editor can be invoked to allow for powerful project analysis. Diagrams are invoked from the Diagrams menu or the right-click speed menu.
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 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, 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. The statements tab displays the source and its line number. 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 Effort Estimation.
You can use Revolve 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, worksheets and associated information, see the chapter Administering Group Working.
Revolve supports specific language extensions for Assembler, PL/I, and Unisys systems.
This section describes the activities common in the Revolve process. Since each site will have different standards and procedures, not all of these activities may be applicable; however, the basic principles will apply.
Revolve requires source code files to be available on a PC accessible disk. Since many sites hold the source code files on a host system, they may need to be downloaded to the PC. See the section Accessing Files from the Mainframe in the chapter Creating and Managing Projects.
A Revolve project contains source files that you can access, analyze, and modify. Revolve by default allows one user per project at any given time: you must make your project shareable if you want multiple users to access and use it.
A single Revolve project can contain up to 32,000 components. This figure represents the number of source members (COBOL, JCL, et cetera.), it does not include copybooks, includes or procs. A 1.6GHz machine with 1G of RAM running Revolve can parse three to four million lines of code in under half an hour (JCL takes a little longer). If you encounter parsing problems, contact Micro Focus.
See the chapter Using Revolve in your Getting Started for full details of how to create and load a project and prepare it for use.
Revolve can process many types of source code, including COBOL, JCL, BMS, and IMS. When the source files (or components, as they are often called) are added to a project, Revolve examines file extensions and uses automatic typing to determine the file type, unless you explicitly specify what type they are. You can add either search paths, or source file components, including copybooks, includes, and proclibs, to your project.
Source files can be loaded (parsed) to create a database which can be interrogated. If any errors occur during the load, they are shown in the Project Complete report and in the Error/ Warning/ Notices report. You can examine the Project Complete Report by selecting Project > Complete, and the Error/ Warning/ Notice Report by selecting Tools > Scripts.
Source code files can be edited with the Split Screen Editor while they are being analyzed. After editing, they may need to be reloaded to keep the database up to date. Revolve can automatically update databases or alert the user that databases are out of sync.
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