CAST Imaging and CAST Gatekeeper enabled Tech Mahindra’s team to accelerate their understanding of a complex black-box application by revealing how it works and to reduce the application’s structural flaws in accordance with ISO 5055.

Challenge

Tech Mahindra was engaged by a major automotive manufacturer to work on a COBOL/DB2 legacy application tightly integrated with internal systems managing inventory, production, supplier payments, and more.

The five-member Tech Mahindra’s team – unfamiliar with the application’s inner workings and lacking reliable documentation – struggled to meet tight SLAs while handling maintenance tasks and implementing change requests.

Solution

Tech Mahindra leveraged CAST Imaging – deployed on-premises to meet the client’s requirements – to reverse-engineer the application through deep, semantic code analysis. The team regained a full understanding by exploring transaction flows – from UI to database – and data call graphs.

They also used the CAST Gatekeeper extension, which identified application’s structural flaws in accordance with the ISO 5055 standard and helped prioritize their remediation based on impact.

Results

CAST Imaging’s maps and insights helped Tech Mahindra’s team understand the application and implement change requests more effectively.

Its multiple views and exploration features reduced investigation time by 25% by revealing how the application works and how changes impact it.

CAST Gatekeeper’s structural flaw insights cut such issues by 10%, improving security, reliability, and performance efficiency.