Enterprise Application Integration

The Requirements

A major financial organization in Cleveland, Ohio undertook a $100+ million project to replace its branch and call center systems. The organization needed leadership for the analysis and design of the EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) layer between the vendor-supplied client system and 30 legacy systems. It needed someone to:

• Work with user and vendor management to define the legacy functionality to be exposed in the EAI layer.

• Lead a team of a half-dozen analysts that provided specifications and support to a team of over forty programmers.

• Develop and implement technical standards for the EAI layer.

• Use Rational Rose as the tool to document the analysis and design.

• Build tools as needed to automate the development of as much of the design and programming as possible, including the generation of as much code as possible.

The Solution

MindCrafted supplied two people to lead the EAI analysis and design effort. We worked closely with retail and back office management as well as with the vendor to perform business analysis.

We developed a rigorous and comprehensive design that provided consistent access to 30 internal and external systems, giving all the interfaces the same look and feel regardless of their platform or language. Client programmers were able to use our interfaces without being able to tell what backend system was involved.

We developed, documented and implemented best practices for everything from the overall design down to tips on how to write an attribute's definition. This resulted in consistent and similar source code throughout the entire EAI layer.

During the construction phase, we provided leadership to guide the writing of these programs by 40+ programmers in various teams. We specified versions and managed changes.

In a project that lasted nearly two years, our EAI team met every deadline and our software had a very low rate of errors.

Our design eased interoperability so much that other projects in the organization immediately began using our interfaces and using our design standards for other projects.

Technology, Tools and Innovations

We created our models and specifications in a very large Rational Rose model. The model had over 360 components and nearly 30,000 attributes. This model successfully drove the entire development process. Using scripts in the model, we generated 70% of the mainframe COBOL code and 100% of the XML for BizTalk maps. We also generated specifications in Word documents for vendor, client, and off-shore programmers directly from the Rose model.

We created Rose scripts to:

• Generate skeleton models – insuring uniformity in our models.
• Audit our models to enforce our standards
• Reverse engineer a major legacy system and load it into the model.

Because our design was rigorous and consistent, and because we generated so much of the code, we were able to turn programming the interfaces into a factory operation. All the programs had the same appearance in code.  Individual programs were not owned by developers -- different developers worked a given program at different times and could move from program to program with ease. This greatly improved development team productivity and increased flexibility in assigning work to programmers.

Needing a tool to manage the development of 360 components and the team of analysts and programmers, we designed and built an Access application that provided information and reporting to several layers of management. We built bridges from the Access application to Rose as well as to the client's defect tracking system then imported the data daily. Managers and analysts used this application throughout the day to log issues, create component versions, make programming assignments - to manage the development process.  By the end of the project, the database contained a wealth of historical information on each component which they then used to begin tracking metrics. They still use this Access application to manage the maintenance of the interfaces. 

This client's EAI infrastructure was a home-grown solution using MQ Series and BizTalk to transport messages primarily to business components implemented as COBOL programs running under CICS. MindCrafted's expertise was utilized in the analysis, design and the development process. This expertise is readily transportable to other technologies.