Compuware and EZLegacy are teaming up to offer the EZSource cross-platform automated analysis and metrics product for reporting across mainframe and distributed platforms. The self-styled "application understanding and measurement" company aims to bring clarity to technical teams building enterprise applications with mainframe skills challenges.

"The industry is facing a significant skills shortage, as highly experienced mainframe professionals who are experts in dealing with complex applications will consider retirement in the next few years," says Compuware.

The firm says that companies using offshore providers for application development and maintenance will particularly benefit from the EZSource product suite. According to a recent independent study on the hidden costs of outsourcing, 80 percent of respondents claim difficulties with knowledge transfer is impacting the quality of outsourced projects. This often results in companies having to increase their investments in performance testing and troubleshooting due to the poor quality of work delivered by outsourcers.

"The EZSource toolkit addresses this knowledge gap by providing robust, automated analysis and measurements as well as detailed documentation and reporting, enabling outsourced teams to more easily verify code quality to make modifications to legacy applications and create new, high-quality applications," says Compuware.

Inside the product here we find EZSource:Analyze — a tool designed to automate source code analysis across platforms so that developers can "take the guesswork out" of determining which code needs to be modified, and how those changes will impact other applications. There is also EZSource:Report, which delivers automated, objective, metric-focused reporting and provides insights such as "where used" and "dead code" occurrences, reducing overall application maintenance costs.