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Target audience:

CAST AI Administrator

Summary: this page lists:

impacts of changes made in CAST AIP 8.2.7 on Quality Model results
other impacts of changes made in CAST AIP 8.2.7
miscellaneous result changes

The changes listed assume that an upgrade from CAST AIP 8.2.6 to CAST AIP 8.2.7 has taken place.

Introduction

Each CAST AIP release provides new features which improve the value of the platform and justify an upgrade. However, there are a number of changes or improvements which can impact the measurement results/grades:

New or improved Quality Rules to perform deeper analysis
Updates to the Assessment Model, e.g. changes to rule weights, severity or thresholds. This can be mitigated by using the "Preserve assessment model" option during the upgrade.
Improvements of the language analysis, e.g. more fine-grained detection of objects or links
Extended automatic discovery of files included in the analysis

Bug fixes to improve the precision of results
And, unfortunately, a new release may also introduce new bugs which may impact the results until they are discovered and removed

Below is a list of changes made to the current release of CAST AIP that are known to cause impacts to results. You can also consult Case Study - Measurement changes after upgrade for selected customer applications which provides a more detailed analysis based on a few sample applications.

Analyzing the root causes of impacts to measurement results/grades

The following is a general description of the steps that should be taken in order to compare pre and post upgrade results:

Step 1: Take a snapshot (including a source code analysis) with the previous release of CAST AIP before upgrading to the new release of CAST AIP
- Check the list of applications to be analyzed, the list of files per application and list of SQL objects from the Analysis Service.
Step 2: Compare the source code in version 1 (before upgrade) with the source code in the new version 2 (after upgrade)
- Compare the list of analyzed files, list of files per application and list of SQL objects between the two Analysis Services
Step 3: Compare the results of the application analysis and snapshot post upgrade. This can be done by comparing the snapshots available in the Dashboard Service to find the differences in:
- Quality rules
- Violations
- Grades at Business Criteria level
- Function Points
- Transactions
- Lines of code
Step 4: Compare the data functions and transactions across the source Analysis Service and the target Analysis Service post upgrade.

Impacts of changes made in CAST AIP 8.2.7 on Quality Model results post upgrade

JEE

Provide accessors to Private Fields - 4576

A bug has been discovered that causes CAST AIP to falsely report a violation to the above named Quality Rule even though accessors are provided for the private field. This bug has now been fixed, therefore after an upgrade to CAST AIP 8.2.7 and the generation of a post upgrade snapshot on the same source code, results may differ: there will be a decrease in the number of violations reported, improving accuracy.

Mainframe: Cobol

Never truncate data in MOVE statements - 7688

A bug has been discovered that causes CAST AIP to falsely report a violation to the above named Quality Rule even though the source and target storage limits are identical. This bug has now been fixed, therefore after an upgrade to CAST AIP 8.2.7 and the generation of a post upgrade snapshot on the same source code, results may differ: there will be a decrease in the number of violations reported, improving accuracy.
A bug has been discovered that causes CAST AIP to falsely report a violation to the above named Quality Rule where the MOVE statement involves a reserved word such as WHEN-COMPILED. This bug has now been fixed, therefore after an upgrade to CAST AIP 8.2.7 and the generation of a post upgrade snapshot on the same source code, results may differ: there will be a decrease in the number of violations reported, improving accuracy.

RPG

Avoid using NOT IN (RPG400) - 1008070, Avoid using NOT EXISTS (RPG400) - 1008068

A bug has been discovered that causes CAST AIP to report a number of false negative violations (i.e. violations are missing) to the above named Quality Rules after an upgrade to a new release of CAST AIP. This bug has now been fixed, therefore after an upgrade to CAST AIP 8.2.7 and the generation of a post upgrade snapshot on the same source code, results may differ: there will be an increase in the number of violations reported, improving accuracy.

Note that this bug exists only in CAST AIP and is not linked to the RPG extension.

Other impacts of changes made in CAST AIP 8.2.7

Unassigned Module

A bug has been discovered that causes CAST AIP to falsely report the total number of Lines of Code (LOC) for all the objects in an Unassigned Module: it reports exactly double the real life value. This bug has now been fixed, therefore after an upgrade to CAST AIP 8.2.7 and the generation of a post upgrade snapshot on the same source code, results may differ: there will be a decrease in the value of the LOC for Unassigned Modules, improving accuracy.

Miscellaneous result changes

N/A