Upgrade Console therefore also reduces your Gen upgrade costs in three ways: Firstly by reducing the effort required during the planning phase; Secondly, by knowing exactly where your application has to be changed you can organize and prioritize the development changes in an effective plan for your teams. Thirdly, you are able to avoid a full application re-test through focused testing effort, rather than the typical high-cost, wide-ranging testing previously required to identify problems prior to Production release.

Following the release of Gen R8.5 in 2013, a global US airline with a mission critical enterprise application built in Gen made the decision to upgrade from Gen R6.0. Their mission-critical application comprised Windows GUI Clients and z/OS servers, with extensive functionality exposed to the Web, mobile platform and third parties through MQ. Using Upgrade Console, the customer was able to assess their application model in a matter of days and identify all known issues requiring remediation or focused testing during the Gen upgrade. Because the required application change and testing focus was identified before the project began, the customer was able to successfully deliver this major upgrade with minimal impact upon their significant global user base.

By identifying the unknowns before you commence your project, the risk to budget, schedule and resources can be dramatically reduced - deliver on time, with no surprises. Without Upgrade Console you need to either manually identify the areas of your application that will require remediation, or alternatively, test exhaustively until you are confident that all the upgrade issues have been identified, and then remediated. Both of these approaches introduce significantly more risk to your Gen upgrade project, and are avoided by using Upgrade Console.

Upgrade Console is available for both the Host and Client Server Encyclopedias and supports every CA Gen release from R5.1, on every Gen technology and deployment platform. Upgrade Console v8.61 supports upgrades to Gen R8.6, and implements well over one hundred upgrade issue checks on your applications.

Upgrade Console is quick to install and simple to use. It is designed to require no specialist skills or services so once you get going, you can have your first models assessed within hours using four simple steps:

1. Tell Upgrade Console what version of Gen you are upgrading from and to, and what technologies you use You select the operating systems, database platforms, languages and technologies for your environment
2. Run the Summary report which identifies each issue that affects each action block in your application This gives you a quick overview of which objects in your model will be affected when you upgrade
3. Run the Detail report which identifies each affected line of code within each action block in every model The detailed analysis pinpoints the issues that affect each action block – down to the exact line of code
4. Review the User Action report which explains what action to take for each identified issue.  Most importantly, the action report provides the background, Gen references, and advice on what action to take to resolve each issue so that your application continues to behave consistently after the upgrade
5. The Task Scheduler can be used to execute these over all your models; this is especially useful if you have significant quantities of models which is typical with customers that utilise CBD.