However, in a fast changing and highly competitive environment, flexibility and responsiveness to customer demands is as important as reliability. Like many organizations, CRI had a choice between focusing on reliability and sacrificing some flexibility, or pursuing flexibility and responsiveness while sacrificing some reliability. CRI demanded both, and set out to find a solution without compromise.
Their search brought them to Brussels and the RainCode organization (http://www.raincode.com). RainCode offers tools that analyze several of the most popular computer languages looking for problems that add cost and time to any planned modifications, including COBOL, Java and Ada. In addition to finding the problems, RainCode can also provide highly leveraged solutions to fixing those problems.
RainCode provided CRI with a license to its COBOL Restructuring Facility tailored to the specialized requirements of IBM iSeries COBOL. The Restructuring Facility analyzes unstructured complex programs to produce highly structured program code that is standards based, optimized for readability, executes faster due to loop reduction, and easier to maintain.
CRI also uses RainCode's Checker for COBOL, which finds programming locations that may fail to adhere to firm programming standards. This helps to ensure flexibility and reduce costs in the program code. Instead of having programmers make thousands or tens of thousands of small changes throughout a library of several thousand programs, Raincode can make those changes to all the programs easily, in a short time and with minimal effort.
After seeing the initial results, CRI has become an enthusiastic proponent of the RainCode technologies. “RainCode offers outstanding tools that automate the process of standardizing our several million line code base. The technology is phenomenal and they succeeded without difficulties where their competitors failed ” said Dennis Noto, CRI Chief Information Officer.
Now, CRI has discovered new possibilities they never anticipated. Software development challenges related to the cost of implementation for a project have been reduced. RainCode radically changes the cost/benefit equation for focusing on code quality with bottom line benefits for CRI and for CRI’s customers.
Darius Blasband of RainCode commented: “by using our state-of-the-
