Micro Focus Revolve

I'm interested in hearing about people's experience with using Micro
Focus Revolve.  Some of the questions that I have are...

1.  What additional features does the Enterprise Edition offer?

2.  What do you think of its price?  This article from 2000 prices
Revolve at $3,200 a seat.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1523677495

3.  What viable alternatives to Revolve are on the market?  It seems
like there used to be a lot of competition in this arena, but has the
demand for products like Revolve dwindled since Y2K?

Thanks,
Brandon King

Hi Brandon

To answer your 3rd question, there are various tools in this area. To
name a few, (from Gartner's magic quadrant), ASG tool suite,
Relativity, SEEC, Compuware and etc.

Choosing the tool depends on the source platform, technology and the
ability to customize. ASG tool suite has the breadth by covering lot
many languages (but independently!) but not giving the depth (as a
single tool!) compared to Relativity and SEEC.

On the above basis, we can compare Revolve with Relativity and SEEC.
Relativity's Modernization Workbench (RMW) supports the languages and
platforms as Revolve. But when we compared and evaluated the reverse
engineering tools available in the market, we, as software service
providers found Relativity is superior of all and utilized this tool
suite for more than 30 - 40 projects.

Some of the key differentiators of RMW against Revolve,
1. Level of Parsing: Depending on the level of information extraction,
we can define the level of parsing. As every application system is
unique in their application architecture, a relaxed parsing at the
preliminary level is very much important to get to know the first
level knowledge about the system.

2. Executive Reports: This is the high level report produced by the
tool from the first cut operation which will give the outline about
the system. This would be very handy and well explained.

3. Exporting Reports: It has some enriched features to export the
reports in the industry standard formats like MS VISIO, WORD, EXCEL
and etc.

If the requirement is understanding the programs and reengineer, the
uncomparable features of Relativity against Revolve are

i)  Business rule extraction and the coverage reports of the extracted
business rules
ii) Componentization and Dead code elimination.

The above two are very much useful when the focus is redevelopment /
rewrite / restructure (to improve maintenance!) the existing large
legacy programs.

Thanks
Jacob S D

On Mar 30, 10:43 am, mrbrandonk...@gmail.com wrote:
> I'm interested in hearing about people's experience with usingMicroFocusRe
volve.  Some of the questions that I have are...
>
> 1.  What additional features does the Enterprise Edition offer?
>
> 2.  What do you think of its price?  This article from 2000 prices
> Revolve at $3,200 a seat.http://www.computerworld.com.au/ind...3677495

>
> 3.  What viable alternatives to Revolve are on the market?  It seems
> like there used to be a lot of competition in this arena, but has the
> demand for products like Revolve dwindled since Y2K?
>
> Thanks,
> Brandon King

On Apr 2, 12:24 am, dhinakarja...@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi Brandon
>
> To answer your 3rd question, there are various tools in this area. To
> name a few, (from Gartner's magic quadrant), ASG tool suite,
> Relativity, SEEC, Compuware and etc.
>
> Choosing the tool depends on the source platform, technology and the
> ability to customize. ASG tool suite has the breadth by covering lot
> many languages (but independently!) but not giving the depth (as a
> single tool!) compared to Relativity and SEEC.
>
> On the above basis, we can compare Revolve with Relativity and SEEC.
> Relativity's Modernization Workbench (RMW) supports the languages and
> platforms as Revolve. But when we compared and evaluated the reverse
> engineering tools available in the market, we, as software service
> providers found Relativity is superior of all and utilized this tool
> suite for more than 30 - 40 projects.
>
> Some of the key differentiators of RMW against Revolve,
> 1. Level of Parsing: Depending on the level of information extraction,
> we can define the level of parsing. As every application system is
> unique in their application architecture, a relaxed parsing at the
> preliminary level is very much important to get to know the first
> level knowledge about the system.
>
> 2. Executive Reports: This is the high level report produced by the
> tool from the first cut operation which will give the outline about
> the system. This would be very handy and well explained.
>
> 3. Exporting Reports: It has some enriched features to export the
> reports in the industry standard formats like MS VISIO, WORD, EXCEL
> and etc.
>
> If the requirement is understanding the programs and reengineer, the
> uncomparable features of Relativity against Revolve are
>
> i)  Business rule extraction and the coverage reports of the extracted
> business rules
> ii) Componentization and Dead code elimination.
>
> The above two are very much useful when the focus is redevelopment /
> rewrite / restructure (to improve maintenance!) the existing large
> legacy programs.
>
> Thanks
> Jacob S D
>
> On Mar 30, 10:43 am, mrbrandonk...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>
> - Show quoted text -

Hi Brandon

For question 1 - Enterprise Edition offers features designed to
perform application-at-once analysis.  These include automated
generation of application documentation, user customizable analysis
tools, composite tools that support aggregation of analysis results
into a repeatable process, group working support, effort estimation
tooling and other features geared at centralized application
analysis.  It is primarily used by large IT shops of 25 - 500 or more
developers.  There is more information available here:
http://www.microfocus.com/products/...volveEEDemo.asp