There are reportedly more daily CICS transactions than the 3.5 billion Google searches a day. Additional research shows that there are over 200 billion lines of active COBOL code. Companies are deeply embedded in a long history of mainframe applications across many types of mainframe languages. Yet the current trend is to move mainframes into “maintain” mode and instead to move forward with sparkly new tech. This approach of a “two-speed IT” has cultural impacts across the organization, such as decreased engagement, and an aging workforce depleting faster than new applications can be implemented.

I reject the idea of “two-speed IT”. Through experience and research, I have found that including the legacy applications in your Agile and DevOps transformations leads to an increase in engagement, focus on quality, more automated testing implementation, and metrics that are meaningful. A company’s true north needs to be accelerating the flow of business value generated by their products and that requires the ability to accelerate that flow across all the systems utilized in their delivery value stream; both systems on engagement and systems of record. In this session, I will show the benefits of including legacy in the transition to continuous deployment pipelines, streamlined development process, and increased flow metrics

Russ has a passion for working with the latest and greatest tools in application development, and an equal passion in teaching those tools to others. This is part of why he became a Technical Account