"..... Given that the primary objective of any organisation is to generate positive financial results, business success increasingly depends on the organisation's ability and understanding of how to fuse the potential power of software development into the fabric of business processes and networks.."           Theme from:  FESMA 2000 Annie DeWitt

PRESS RELEASE    FEBRUARY 2001

Heart starter for ageing COBOL systems

Local product brings application mining to surface

A Melbourne based consulting company is using a combination of knowledge recovery and reverse engineering to save the sanity of local and international COBOL system managers.

MakeSense, produced by McRae IT, presents software components of a COBOL system in a Windows framework. This enables a development team to intuitively navigate and understand their application.

MakeSense architect John McRae, justified its development: "I’ve managed large and complex systems locally and overseas for 15 years and witnessed all the pitfalls and wasteful practices associated with inadequate estimation, training and documentation."

Mr McRae decided that there had to be a better way: MakeSense is the result.

With MakeSense, users are able to examine, map, and document the interdependence of a system's program modules on screen. The whole application can be trawled for potential problems and the impact of any proposed change. This enables IT managers to significantly reduce risk whilst enhancing output quality.

It is important to note that MakeSense preserves knowledge at the system level. Through a proprietary documentation improvement process, it builds upon the organisational memory over time, regardless of team changes.

The application allows companies to assimilate business and technical knowledge through a total systems approach of mapping business processes directly against individual code segments and other system components.

McRae IT has a one-off analysis service which supplies a map or "snapshot" of a client's current system. Prices for a snapshot begin at $1500.

At a later stage a fully fledged product can be installed and integrated with existing training, estimation and documentation processes. Prices vary according to the level of implementation.

John McRae said, "We are looking particularly at sites with over 250,000 lines of code, where managers are no longer in their comfort zone and are deploying unnecessary capital in the maintenance of their systems".

"When you consider that in one week you get what it would take an analyst three months to produce, and be viewable in a Windows environment, the attraction is obvious," McRae explained.

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PRESS RELEASE     MARCH 2000

McRae IT announces CMM focus for MakeSense

Cost and time overruns are endemic in the software industry. Despite processes that are explicitly defined, measured and controlled, projects can be difficult to control.

One strategy companies are being offered by the Melbourne based consulting company McRae IT is "MakeSense", a software lifecycle process improvement product for complex IT systems.

John McRae says " Facilitating a company’s accreditation at the next level of CMM is a major reason for the recent enhancements to MakeSense. We now allow users to document business processes and directly link them to the underlying technical components of the system".

MakeSense also includes a collaborative documentation improvement process modeled on open source products such as Linux. The result of this knowledge-sharing environment is a consistent set of business processes that have been incrementally improved by many users.

"The issue of having talented developers walk out the door and leaving a bare minimum of their knowledge with the company, is mitigated" said McRae.

 

MakeSense improves the software development process by addressing training, documentation and estimation issues. The business benefits come from better knowledge management, easier training/upskilling, up-to-date documentation and more reliable estimation of change.

MakeSense can be installed as a complete product or can be accessed by three low cost service options.

John McRae said: "We have factored in the needs of those installations which might not need a full deployment of our management tool. MakeSense has something to offer all categories of manager."

"These range from a one-time analysis to a matching process for system components and the associated documentation", added McRae.

McraeIT can be contact on +61 3 98822042 or at www.mcraeit.com.au

 

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