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October 2008 Calendar

CS Masters' Thesis Defense

Title: A Practical Approach Towards Converting Legacy Decision Systems
Speaker: Rajesh Kemburu
Date: Friday, October 24, 2008
Time: 10:00 a.m.
Location: GMCS 405
Thesis advisor: Dr Carl Eckberg

Abstract:
This thesis is about converting a legacy decision system to a more sophisticated and user-friendly system. The company was using a legacy COBOL based decision system to support all its front-end originations comprising of its underwriting, decisioning and pricing processes. In lieu of the changing business landscape and the vendor?s decision to stop support for the legacy system, the company at a corporate level decided to adopt a new Java based decision system.

As a senior risk analyst, supporting the company?s decision system, I was the ad-hoc consultant for the conversion project to help the Conversion Team in planning the design of the new system. However when the Conversion Team started facing challenges during the coding phase I volunteered to help the team in resolving the challenges related to data structure layout, converting system-critical COBOL code into Java based script and other challenges related to coding within the new system?s IDE. This thesis essentially details all my time dedicated to this project, on a voluntary basis, in identifying some of the coding challenges the Conversion Team faced and how I helped them in overcoming these challenges and the valuable lessons that the team and I learned during this process which will serve as a best practices guide for future conversions within other companies.
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