Grouping Applications by Matching Design Elements

When preparing a redevelopment and migration estimate to transition your custom Domino applications to a new platform it is extremely important to group similar application designs together for in-depth analysis. These applications are NOT replica copies, but their design elements match so closely that they are first cousins that were probably built from the same template, so they should not be included in the estimate for redevelopment twice, or more.

Having an accurate assessment of your Domino application environment can help prepare for the investment needed to migrate to a new platform. The Domino administration tools make this extremely difficult however, since they only list applications by their template name and DB name. Even though two Domino apps have completely separate templates, DB Names and different users, they may be the same under the covers. They may utilize the same forms, views, LotusScript agents, and other design elements with just a few changes. This means that the redevelopment effort for one of them will suffice for the other copies.

iDNA solves this challenge and makes the grouping relatively easy. After scanning all applications and gathering the design and code elements to catalog them within the datastore, the system runs a matching algorithm to determine how much overlap there is between application designs. As seen in the screenshot below, iDNA will provide a percentage ranking of the similarity between applications.

With this information the migration planning team can analyze just one of these application copies to estimate the redevelopment scope. This provides a much more accurate cost estimate for the level of effort required to redesign, redevelop, and migrate to a new target platform.

The main benefit for grouping similar applications together is to reduce the scope of the migration estimate. Why would you redevelop the same application twice, or three times, or more? Many organizations have fallen into the trap of estimating the complexity of their Domino migration by just counting all the unique applications that are still in use. These estimates are always way too high since they are counting similar applications multiple times. From our years of experience working with customers around the world to plan their migrations, we have seen that most organizations can remove between 20% and 40% of their custom applications from redevelopment estimates because they are based on design copies of each other with a majority of matching elements.