Why are we unique?

The ARCAD-Observer suite brings easy to use application intelligence, for maintaining and transferring knowledge of existing systems, to your organization. Whether the context is application maintenance or modernization, the basic needs are the same: to find information and have ready access to technical documentation that is guaranteed to be relevant and up to date.

The ARCAD-Observer suite gives you full control over the technical knowledge of existing applications. ARCAD-Observer is a powerful navigator for your information system, plus a means of automating documentation production. With ARCAD-Observer, new staff members are productive more rapidly, the lifetime of your applications is extended, and legal obligations are fulfilled. In the case of third-party application management, ARCAD-Observer brings real transparency to workload estimates - and for the customer, a guaranteed technical grasp over his applications.

Application mining

ARCAD-Observer’s specialized tools synthesize information and ease navigation through millions of lines of code. With these tools at hand, new staff members become productive more rapidly, and you extend the life of your applications. Once you have completed audit and loading phases, you can access the repository from a PC.

ARCAD-Observer references all dependencies between applications and components down to the field and source line level, whatever language is used. You can analyze the information flow across processes and quickly identify business rules contained in the code. Its built-in diagram editor displays information as graphics. You can enhance these diagrams and include them in documentation.

Macroscopic views

When you have thousands of components in your information system, you need to have a tool to provide a more synthetic view of the entire picture. ARCAD-Observer provides this type of feature thru what are called “macroscopic views”. They allows you to cut your applications into different functional domains, link your components to those domains, and then see all dependencies at a functional level. This feature has become popular over time as people realized that it's a way to simplify the overall “map” of an information system and easily see the dependencies between the different domains.

Database re-engineering

The most important aspect in the comprehension of an information system is understanding data architecture. Using a variety of methods, ARCAD-Observer analyzes the links between data files and reproduces them in the form of data models. This same information can be recovered in standard DDL (data definition language) format that is compatible with most modeling tools on the market like Rational Software Architect or Power AMC, for example.

Documentation

If you have discovered that your application’s documentation is obsolete ─ or even non-existent ─ ARCAD-Observer offers an immediate solution that fulfills regulatory requirements (FDA standards, ISO 9000, etc.).

ARCAD-Observer automates production of technical documents. You can enhance the automatically generated portions by adding text or customizing diagrams with ARCAD-Observer’s documentation editor. Standard export format is HTML, so you can easily distribute your documentation to a wide audience. Going forward, if you also implement ARCAD-Skipper change management, you can define an update procedure to ensure that your application’s documentation remains up to date.

A special note: ARCAD is unique in that we offer change management and application analysis in a single interface. Check out ARCAD-Skipper if you are also interested in a highly integrated, multi-platform change management solution.