Move off COBOL safely — staged, documented, reversible. Inventory legacy programs, auto-document them, pin behavior with characterization tests, translate, prove equivalence with a parallel run, and cut over with a hash-chained, signed audit ledger.
Move off COBOL without betting the business on a big-bang rewrite. Modernize turns a legacy codebase into a tracked, staged migration where every program is proven behaviorally identical before cutover and every change is reversible.
What's included
Each program is a migration unit on a gated lifecycle: Inventory → Document → Characterize → Translate → Verify → Parallel-run → Cutover → Retire
Characterization tests + parallel-run equivalence prove the new code behaves identically before any cutover
A program can never be changed before it has a safety net — the gate is enforced server-side
Hash-chained, Ed25519-signed ledger gives point-in-time rollback and offline-verifiable provenance
COBOL, PL/I, RPG → Java, Go, Python, C#, or an in-place refactor; billed at GCP/AI cost + 15%
About this module
The reason mainframe-rewrite projects fail is that there is no safety net: nobody fully understands what the code does, nothing proves the replacement behaves the same, and there is no clean way back when production breaks at 2am. Modernize attacks exactly that. Each program, copybook, and JCL becomes a migration unit on a gated lifecycle — Inventory, Document, Characterize, Translate, Verify, Parallel-run, Cutover, Retire — and the gates are enforced, not advisory. A unit physically cannot be translated until it has been characterized, because you never change code that has no safety net.
Two layers make it safe. Characterization tests capture the legacy program's real inputs and outputs as golden masters, and a parallel-run harness executes the new implementation beside the old one and compares — you only cut over when equivalence is proven. On top of that, every transformation is appended to a hash-chained, Ed25519-signed ledger, so you can roll back to any prior point and a third party can verify the provenance offline. The whole modernization — source, specs, tests, and ledger — exports as a portable signed bundle, so you are never locked into Turtini.
Translate to Java, Go, Python, or C#, or do a clean in-place COBOL refactor and stay on the mainframe. The heavy lifting — auto-documentation, test synthesis, translation, and the parallel-run compute — is metered at cost plus 15%, the same rail as Turtini lab environments. Wally rides along the whole way: ask what's left to modernize, what a program does, or how much the rest will cost, and it answers from the live migration state.
What you can do with it
Document a 40-year-old COBOL batch nobody on staff fully understands — in plain English, automatically
Prove a translated interest-accrual program matches the mainframe penny-for-penny before cutting over
Roll a bad cutover back to the exact prior artifact using the signed ledger
Give auditors an offline-verifiable record of every change made to a regulated system
Stay on the mainframe but de-GOTO and restructure COBOL with a characterization safety net
Get this module
Free for all Turtini organizations.
Who it's for
- Banks and insurers running core ledgers on COBOL/mainframe
- Federal agencies and GovCon teams under mandates to modernize legacy systems
- Systems integrators delivering mainframe-migration engagements who need an auditable method
Details
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