With their outdated technology and high costs, legacy codebases hold enterprises back. But in many cases, the prospect of migrating to modern cloud native, open source languages1 seems even worse.
Migration projects typically require significant time and money. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have emerged to help, but many businesses fear they will expose their intellectual property, hallucinate errors or fail on large codebases because of their prompt limits. And that leaves them with daunting manual migrations on their hands.
EXL Code Harbor is a GenAI-powered, multi-agent tool that enables the fast, accurate migration of legacy codebases while addressing these crucial concerns.
How Code Harbor works
Code Harbor accelerates current state assessment, code transformation and optimization, and code testing and validation. Throughout each stage of the process, it relies on task-specific, finely tuned agents built to exceed the efficiency and expertise of humans.
- Assessment: Deciphers and documents the business logic, dependencies and functionality of legacy code.
- Governance: Maps data flows, dependencies, and transformations across different systems.
- Migration: Chunks, simplifies, and moves the code to the desired language, then recompiles it to recreate its full logic. Optimizes code.
- Testing & Validation: Auto-generates test data when real data is unavailable, ensuring robust testing environments. Execute both legacy and converted code in parallel to identify runtime issues. Auto-corrects errors iteratively, flagging only critical issues for human review.
To accomplish this, Code Harbor uses AI agents that replicate the entire migration journey. By taking EXL’s expertise in helping enterprises design both legacy and modern architectures and building it into these agents, the tool tackles every migration task with greater accuracy and efficiency:
- Business Analyst: Code explanation, documentation, pseudo code.
- Code Assessor Agent: Workload analysis, dependency identification, and code composition and complexity.
- Data Navigator Agent: Maps data flows, dependencies, and transformations.
- Code Simplifier Agent: Logically chunks the source code.
- Code Migrator Agent: Translates legacy code while preserving functionality.
- Code Optimizer Agent: Enhances the code’s readability and refactors its logic.
- Synthetic Data Generator Agent: Ensures robust testing by creating test data.
- Code Executor Agent: Executes legacy and converted code in parallel.
- Debugger Agent: Autocorrects and flags errors.
- Data Validator Agent: Compares the source and migrated code outputs.
Code Harbor’s orchestration layer automates workflows across these agents, allowing enterprises to lessen their risk by migrating code in phases.
Real-world benefits
By eliminating redundant code and optimizing performance, Code Harbor reduces the manual effort required for assessment, conversion and testing by 60% to 80%. Let’s take a deeper look at the tool’s benefits:
- Increased performance and efficiency: Code Harbor analyzes the business context of code and utilizes the benefits of the target language instead of performing a line-by-line migration. Every agent is designed to enhance code efficiency, maintainability and adaptability at every stage of the process.
- Greater integration and scalability: This modular architecture distributes tasks across multiple agents working in parallel, so Code Harbor can perform more work in less time. And by chunking and simplifying code pre-migration, the tool ensures enterprises can move and manage even the largest codebases.
- Improved security and compliance: Code Harbor doesn’t store or use customer data for training or fine-tuning models, and businesses can choose which large language models to use to best protect their data: open source or proprietary, on-premises or in the cloud. Because the tool generates synthetic testing data gleaned from the context of the code, it’s able to optimize, debug and test code in a way that other tools simply can’t — all while protecting the privacy of an enterprise’s actual data and IP. It further avoids IP infringement by training AI models that are trained on coding data with permissive licenses.
Backed by 20 years of expertise and a purpose-built multi-agent framework, Code Harbor provides the flexible, customer-centric approach that businesses need for complex code migrations.
Banks see faster migrations
Enterprises in the financial services industry are already reaping the benefits. A top UK bank worked with EXL to move its extract, transform, load codebase from SAS to Python. The migration, which included complete testing and number matching, was over 35% faster than previous manual migrations.
In another case, a global financial institution used Code Harbor to optimize its BigQuery syntax, logic and explainability. EXL also generated synthetic data to use for iterative testing and other code improvements. Overall, the firm cut code compute time and memory usage by 25% and query plans by 10%.
By using GenAI and a security-first approach, Code Harbor accelerates modern migrations, freeing enterprises to focus on innovation. To learn more about how it can benefit your organization, attend the upcoming webinar, AI in Action: Driving the Shift to Scalable AI.
