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?

1. 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
   
   
   
   
   

2. 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
   

    

3. 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.

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.

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.

If you want to be part of the beta release to provide feedback or just want to explore the new features in depth, please reach out to us here.