Many thanks to Transvive for this guest blog. You can meet Sam and other colleagues from Transvive at next week’s Developer Conference in San Francisco or the week after in New York, where they will be speaking in more detail about ‘Making the move to Visual COBOL’.
Author: Sam Malek, Transvive
The lean start-up movement has changed the way we look at software development. It is widely adopted by many start-ups, however its author – Eric Ries *- advocates that it can apply to well established corporation in the same way it applies to start-ups.
When it comes to applications written in COBOL, it is sometimes perceived that it is very difficult to apply lean start-up techniques for application development because of a tools rigidity or lack of contemporary COBOL development workflow. However, the availability of a new tool such as Visual COBOL can easily bridge that gap and bring lean start-up methodology to COBOL development.
Here are three key features in Visual COBOL where we see Lean startup meets COBOL Development:
- As we have seen with many customers, with Visual COBOL, development teams can easily leverage existing code base to modernize user interface and extend the capabilities of existing applications into the .NET and Java worlds, leading to a faster time to market;
- Another key advantage of Visual COBOL is its IDE interface, where developers are able to use their IDE of choice (Visual Studio or Eclipse) to develop, maintain and extend the capabilities of the existing COBOL code, and fully integrate COBOL development into existing modern development workflows. This modern IDE interface breaks the barrier to learn and adopt COBOL development , which can result in attracting new talent to learn COBOL as a development language;
- And lastly, Visual COBOL brings the COBOL language into the discussions around Cloud deployment, Mobile applications and Big Data by leveraging valuable business logic developed in COBOL in these discussions. Where the main discussion becomes “What can be done” vs. “How to”.
Lean start-up as a methodology is not about a specific development language, it is about a framework that validates assumptions and integrates end user feedback rapidly. When it comes to COBOL development, Visual COBOL can be a tool that enables development teams to adopt lean start-up.
What do you think of Visual COBOL? Join the discussion on Twitter – #DevCon2013 , and we look forward to seeing you at the Micro Focus DevCon2013 .
About Transvive
Transvive helps organizations preserve their investment in legacy assets with low-cost, low-risk and high-return alternatives to application rewrites and package purchases. Transvive has been providing solutions to significantly reduce operating costs and risks and increase efficiency and speed to market.
Transvive stands for Transform and Revive , a privately held corporation headquartered in Toronto, Ontario.
*Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. In 2010, he became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School.
