Discover and analyze business logic

mimicry Concept

mimicry is a novel method for understanding and reengineering aging software systems, enabled by recent advances in artificial intelligence and by a unique combination of machine-based and human analyses. mimicry extracts business logic such as workflows, dataflows, functions and business rules, and data types and data models from your application. It develops a mental model of the business functions it performs, ready to be explored by business and technical experts.

The model serves as an executable specification, enabling to run selected or all business logic on a cloud-native architecture mimicking the behavior of the aging application. Enhancements to the business logic can be prototyped with agile methods.

mimicry enables enterprises to unchain the hidden assets in their aging software systems, replicating their business functionality in a simplified application using today’s architectures and infrastructures. It empowers companies to innovate faster, at lower risk, and at lower cost.

mimicking an Aging Application: Proven Business Logic, Implemented Anew

Uses of mimicry

Accelerate and safeguard application renewal

Gain an overview of the application and deep insights into its business functionality
Create a multidimensional specification explorable from different angles and at different levels of detail
Automatically create artefacts to be used in a new application such as data types and data models, interface definitions, data validation functions, data mapping and formatting functions, and business-domain specific functions
Use the executable specification as a cloud-native replacement for the original application

Extract specific use cases or functionalities

Extract a specification for a specific use case or functionality from a large platform, preparing for its re-implementation on a different platform in a coherent manner
Create a micro-service for the use case or functionality

Agilely explore business functionality changes

Use the cloud-native executable specification to rapidly prototype and simulate business functionality changes before implementing them in a core application

Answer questions by audit and regulators

Answers questions by audit and regulators regarding data quality, data lineage, and business logic using the application model

mimicry Successes

Moving a payment processing application onto a distributed ledger platform

mimicry migrated selected business logic of a payments processing platform onto a Hyperledger Fabric distributed ledger, adapting the business logic to store transactional data in the distributed ledger. The generated Go program featured an actor programming style and worked as an application distributed over multiple processing nodes.

Understanding a 40-year old mainframe batch program

mimicry analyzed a mainframe batch program, part of a 40-year old transaction processing platform. The analysis flagged a number of data consistency issue within the application environment. The extracted business logic illustrated the feasibility of mimicking logic embedded in these types of applications.

Creating a Stock Exchange Order Book module

mimicry learned with minimal human assistance from an order book data feed how to manage an order book, and how to create snapshots. The resulting modern C++ program was praised for its clean structure and high efficiency in a review with software architects.

Enabling analysis of mainframe application behavior

mimicry learned how to decode system execution traces from IBM's z/OS Generalized Trace Facility, enabling automated analysis of resource consumption and performance issues.

Analyzing a complex rule-based transaction compliance validation system

mimicry analyzed the business logic of a rule-based system with more than 4'000 business rules, with the processed input and output data having more than a hundred input and output fields. It extracted complex rule sets, and provided advanced tools to analyze, simplify, and cross-validate rule sets.

Migrating heterogeneous web applications to a homogeneous modern JAM stack

mimicry extraced the business logic of multiple server-side rendering web applications using technologies such as PHP and Python/Django, and replicated the logic in modern TypeScript/JavaScript for mixed client-side and server-side use. It enabled the integration of the different solutions into one uniform new web application featuring current web standards, support of modern continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) environments for agile change, and deployment on content-delivery networks (CDN) for improved user response times.

Creating a Master Data Design toolset

mimicry client engagements surfaced the need to support the design and maintenance of master data as rigorously as the design and maintenance of software code. Using assets from the mimicry tool set, mimicry developed a product supporting the design and maintenance of complex interconnected master data sets with unlimited time-dependent versioning, full audit logging, and configurable data type, quality, and consistency checking.

See mimicry Master Data Designer for details.

Our Mission

Our mission at mimicry is to make business experts and software engineers focus on novel capabilities for the business with new technology, freeing them from disentangling complexity piled up over years. We thereby empower corporations – and entire industries – to innovate and capture new business opportunities.

Dr. Marc Brandis, Founder, mimicry AG

Marc Brandis has been advising enterprises on strategic IT topics for more than twenty years. He teaches at ETH Zurich and serves on the Board of Directors of ETH Juniors, promoting knowledge transfer between academia and industry.

Business Logic Extraction

Proven functionality on modern technology