The assessment performs an automated analysis of the entire mainframe application landscape. It analyzes all software and data objects, their properties, and their relationships.
Every CIO and development manager has experienced this: after just a few weeks into a project, unexpected problems begin to emerge. No one knew that application A calls some programs from application B, or that an application indirectly uses IMS, even though it was assumed that everything ran on DB2. Or that a complex, undocumented, but essential Assembler date routine is being called, and so on.
In the end, the “small change” or the project becomes twice as expensive and takes three times longer than planned.
This usually happens because there was simply no effective way to see all the relationships between the objects in the application landscape – whether programs, files, DB tables, fields, or jobs.
If this information had been available before, these problems would not have occurred.
A mainframe application landscape consists of thousands of software objects: programs, COPY books, jobs, scheduling files, catalogs, online transactions, file descriptions, and more. Managing this complexity manually or semi-automatically is truly unfeasible.
That’s why ITM developed the Njema Assessment..
Njema includes parsers for a wide variety of languages—it can read Cobol and PL/I as well as Natural, job control (in various dialects), Assembler, scheduler files, SDF, Easytrieve, REXX, CA-Earl, DB schemas, CICS tables, and much more. This allows the product to perform a comprehensive analysis and build the Njema database, which contains the metadata of all objects, including their properties and relationships.
In the meantime, more than 400 million lines have been analyzed with Njema, and a large portion of them has been transformed into other languages and target architectures.
The Njema assessment has proven itself in a variety of different application areas. Accordingly, it is also offered in different contractual scenarios.