Accelerate Software Architecture discovery using CAST Imaging 1.7

Our mission when we set out to build CAST Imaging was to accelerate software architecture discovery and make it super easy for developers and architects to discover and understand an application, however complex the application may be. Staying true to our mission, we are constantly striving to improve the user experience and value that CAST Imaging provides to its audience

What’s New?

Simplify your software architecture discovery – Discover the app in parts
As many of you may have experienced, CAST Imaging massively reduces the amount of time it takes for you to discover and understand an application. This is possible because Imaging provides different levels of abstraction. It analyzes the application code, extracts objects and groups the objects into easily inferable clusters/nodes.

What’s made the application discovery process easier is that you can now use CAST Imaging to expand and view specific parts of your application while keeping the rest of the software architecture in the background.

Previously moving from one level of detail to another would expand all the nodes in the application view making it difficult for our users to assimilate and understand the numerous nodes. With the latest release, you can expand and view only the node that you want to explore.

This further simplifies how you go about understanding your application. You can double click a node and it expands to show its consistent components.

Double click on the view to expand only the User Interaction
Abstracted object level view of the software architecture
In the earlier version, when we move from Level 5 to the object level, it could be difficult to differentiate between the child objects, the caller objects and the callee objects. Especially with large applications this can be a major pain for the user. With the new enhancement, when you double click on a level 5 node to move to the object level view of the software architecture, only the node is expanded and the caller and callee objects are abstracted to make it easier for the users to comprehend. Then, each caller or callee area can be expanded for further investigation
Export Object level details to excel
More often, our users want to share the object level data with their teams to solve specific problems with respect to their applications. Now a single file (xlsx or csv) aggregates all objects of the view plus the list of caller / callee of each object. Software architecture problems such as reviewing all objects for dependency on a deprecated library can be solved efficiently by tracking the list of objects exported from the view.

CAST-Imaging-export-object-level-details-excel

What’s Planned?

Of the several requests we get from existing users, a common one is ‘Can Imaging help us discover an application functionally?’. Well the answer will be Yes in the coming release. We have now released a Beta version to a select list of pilot users to get feedback. In its current form, the new view will help you discover an application based on the configuration of module done during the AIP Analysis.

CAST-Imaging-Discover-application-functionality-software-architecture

To summarize, this release makes application discovery of large complex application much easier by enabling the discovery in parts and abstracting the complexity from the user’s interface.

You can get a first-hand experience and complimentary access to CAST Imaging by clicking here.

Filed in: Modern Architecture Software Intelligence

Cloud Smart: How to Ensure an Efficient and Secure Journey

Recorded Webinar

Software Intelligence at the core of M&A Advisory

Erik Oltmans, an Associate Partner from EY, Netherlands, spoke at the Software Intelligence Forum on how the consulting behemoth uses Software Intelligence in its Transaction Advisory services.

Erik describes the changing landscape of M & A. Besides the financial and commercial aspects, PE firms now equally value technical assessments, especially for targets with significant software assets. He goes on to detail how CAST Highlight makes these assessments possible with limited access to the targetâ€™s systems, customized quality metrics, and liability implications of open source components - all three that are critical for an M&A due diligence.

Video Interview

Eliminate vulnerabilities while improving performance

CAST AIP was implemented for a Federal Law Enforcement Agency in the US. CAST AIP helped identify and resolve several critical violations and flaws in the software leading to an immediate saving of ~ $250K in software maintenance.

Case Study

Damien Charlemagne Senior Product Manager

Damien is a Senior Product Manager at CAST and for the last decade has helped developers, technical leaders and C- Level executives understand complex architecture and software design. He is passionate about the constant evolution of IT systems at large enterprises and keeping stakeholders up-to-speed on emerging business technologies.