Watch it: Agile COBOL 2009
jkumon | July 23, 2009Thanks to our friends at Micro Focus for THE COBOLATOR video, which they shot to celebrate 50 years of COBOL.
We at MAKE spend all of our time helping customers who are sick of their legacy systems and the lack of flexibility they bring. These mainframe applications cost a lot of companies massive amounts of money. And the problem is not COBOL per se, although 50 years of building software systems has actually resulted in some more suitable programming languages, the problem is legacy systems misaligned with the business they are supposed to be supporting. Running that system on Unix, or Windows, or the Cloud, will not help you with that.
And that’s why you need… Agile COBOL!
Enjoy:
Just because you call something “agile”…doesn’t make it so. I keep saying this to people who aren’t as agile in their thinking and their ability to stay as current as they think they are. Their knowledge of what COBOL can do is extremely obsolete. SOA? check! .NET? check! Unit testing? Really??…been doing that for years! Scrum?? Norhing to do with COBOL or any language for that matter…Scrum complements COBOL quite well! …oh btw…high volume transcation processing on Windows, Linux, Unix…at a much lower cost than the mainframe…while taking advantage of SOA, .NET, etc….CHECK!
I know: we were just making fun of taking new terminology and technologies and applying them without thought to older platforms. COBOL is an easy target, but it applies to almost every existing language: we haven’t even started to talk about Natural for Ajax, OO PHP or ADABAS SOA.
We, technologists, spend a lot of time discussing ‘could’, but often forget ‘should’. It is not about ‘check’-ing of features, it is about making organizations work better while reducing cost.
This starts to sound like another blog post.
You guys haven’t published anything since July. I find the challenges of maintaining and modernizing legacy systems to be the most difficult and interesting of all computer science and software engineering problems. JULY? I’ll give it another month, then I’m dropping this rss sub.