gmStudio Roadmap

I was in a sales demo last week and an architect from the client team asked about the gmStudio roadmap so I felt it was a good topic for a blog entry.  A sampling of roadmap objectives are presented below.  These are only teaser descriptions: the problems and solutions are in the details and no details are covered here.  Each of these these deserves its own blog post and much more....  stay tuned.

Testing Enhancements

Enhance the tool to assist with functional quality verification.  Everyone of our customers can use help with testing and there are many things we can do to help: test case generation, test data identification, automating comparison of old and new systems.

New Types of Migrations

Support  new target and source languages as well as application architecture changes, the sky's the limit.

• Support for .NET Core conventions, frameworks, and tools
• .NET to .NET – global refactoring
• Desktop to Mobile, Desktop to Web, Desktop to RIA
• Desktop to WPF
• Oracle Form Migration
• VBA Migration (Access to .NET)
• Embedded SQL to stored procs 
• Desktop to Web
• ASPclassic to MVC
• Java to .NET
• VB6 to Java
• Application Security auditing and risk mitigation
• Additional COM replacements rules and extensions

More Prescriptive target application architectures and frameworks

In general, we assume that customers want to follow their own standard for architecture and code so we focus on flexibility, but frequently customers want us to prescribe major aspects of the target design for them.  Being able to move a legacy application into a comprehensive predefined application architecture would be a compelling offering to many customers.  We intend to look for such frameworks (such as Enterprise Library and various open source frameworks) and help customers adopt them as part of the migration.

gmStudio UX Enhancements

We could do a lot to improve user experience and productivity.   Some ideas for improving the gmStudio UX are:

• Easier implementation of advanced transformations
• improved Visual Studio integrations
• Custom configuration files editors
• integrating analysis and configuration tasks.

De-Localization

Some of our international customers have international characters in their application symbols  (i.e. variable names, function names): they want these removed.  This would be a small matter using gmStudio. 

Localization

Some of our customers want to rework their codes to work for international markets.  There are certain conventions and best practices for writing systems in .NET that facilitate localization and we can generate codes that conform to these conventions and best practices.

Test Planning and Estimation Enhancements

Enhance the tool to integrate code analysis features with test planning and estimation concepts so that extremely large software re-engineering efforts can be completed most efficiently.

Customer Feedback

And last but definitely not least: one of most important items on our roadmap is incorporating improvements that come up in working with customers.  These items typically get moved right to the front of the line in terms of our release planning.  If you have features you would like to see added to gmStudio, please contact us and reference this blog.