About ARCAD Observer

Cross-platform, graphical application analysis, along with a diagram generator and automatic generation of technical documentation

ARCAD-Observer in the ARCAD Software product suite

Whether you are an experienced IT professional on IBM i or a newcomer to the platform, the task of understanding a legacy application before making further changes can be a time-consuming and daunting task.

ARCAD Observer automates application analysis to improve productivity and accuracy in software maintenance and modernization.

ARCAD Observer is the solution to three key issues:

  • Re-documenting the Information System;
  • Improving productivity during a project’s impact analysis phase;
  • Capitalizing on and disseminating knowledge of the Information System.

This is crucial for IT departments that:

  • make modifications to their applications.
  • develop new applications around their existing system (client/server or web).
  • migrate to other systems.

Software development teams spend at least 50% of their time trying to understand an application’s internal architecture before modifying it. Many applications on IBM i are years, even decades old. They have been modified many times by various developers who may no longer be with the company, and documentation is often missing or out-of-date. Sometimes changes have been made which were easy rather than well-done- which creates a heavy "technical debt" that increases the cost of making further changes. If you are involved in application maintenance, enhancement, modernization, or re-engineering, you need an efficient way to quickly find dependencies within complex applications and understand their structure.

ARCAD Observer is an Eclipse plug-in available for RDi and RTC, and pre-packaged in the ARCAD Client RCP. It is part of a plug-in package for Application Analysis.

ARCAD Observer application analysis features

Navigator: Point and click application navigator by view

Impact analysis: “Where-used”, down to source line and field level

Multi-level, version specific view: Dynamic viewing and Query relative to a specific version

LPEX integration: Context-sensitive cross-referencing as developers edit, compile, debug, ...

Diagrams: Observe and analyze your programs via I/O diagrams, workflow diagrams, database relationship models and program/procedure calling chains

  • Database relationship diagram: Extraction of your underlying database relationship model
  • I/O diagram, workflow diagram: View of dependencies between programs and files
  • Calling chain diagram: View of calling chains, both programs and ILE procedures
  • Macroscopic views: High-level functional view

ARCAD Observer application documentation feature

List manager: List generation, for managing application artifacts in groups

Documenter: Auto-generation of technical documentation in HTML