The Issue...

When you have applications made up of thousands of components, it can be tricky to get an overall view of the applications and of all the interactions between functional domains and sub-domains.

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At this time, keeping these systems healthy mainly depends on the accumulated expertise of the developers who have maintained the applications for years. This is a risky situation for a company; first, because this knowledge could evaporate as these valuable associates leave, and second because an informal system of this kind slows down any efforts to modernize the application legacy.

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The ARCAD Solution...

ARCAD has carefully thought these issues through, and then developed a totally unique tool: our Macroscopic Views. These views provide a graphic representation of the overall Information System functionality as several strata of information. Our system lets you navigate through an application’s internal architecture and gives a concrete idea of all the dependencies between the various functional modules.

How does it work?
This system is based on ARCAD’s functional tree solution. Applications are placed into a three-level structure:

• Sub-systems
  • Functions
    • Sub-functions

Once this functional tree has been defined, the next step is to attach software components to each of the functional branches you have defined. Thanks to two tools included in the solution, this task is no longer a difficult one. These tools are:

• Cross-references, which help create batches of interdependent components.
• The list manager, which lets you store component batches and then perform a mass attachment of these batches to the branches of the functional tree.

Once this job has been completed, the macroscopic view editor will let you navigate around the different functional dependencies of your application modules and visualize the components that serve as an interface between these modules.

Benefits

This system will be extremely useful when you need to isolate functional problems in your applications so you can upgrade them with new technologies. If your project is to adapt an SOA, you can save a huge amount of time in the process of analyzing existing applications.