Mapador Inc.

Automated Application Cartography


  

DOCUMENTATION

 

Mapador Inc. offers a practical solution for both components of a comprehensive documentation strategy:

 

·         It ensures that existing documentation is properly vetted, indexed, controlled and maintained

·         It automatically generates documentation from existing corporate artifacts.

 

Control over documentation is an overall business issue, not simply a departmental or IT requirement.  Organizing and maintaining documentation is increasingly important for many non-IT organizations striving to gain control over their ever increasing number of documents. It also comes to the forefront when discussing governance requirements, implementing or improving standards, initiating an outsourcing engagement or embarking on M&A activities.

 

Lacking proper documentation, applications become harder and harder to maintain and overall maintenance costs increase. Without department-wide understanding and knowledge, valuable resources are tied down to carry out relatively simple activities and resource allocation bottlenecks delay project deliveries.

 

Unfortunately, while the need for having up-to-date and correct documentation is talked about all the time, documentation projects are typically the first to become victims of scarce budgets. When everyone knows the importance of proper documentation, why would it not be, finally, created or updated?

 

The underlying reasons are simple:

 

·         Documenting an application is a tremendous manual effort, tying up the most valuable resources

·         As soon as documentation is created, it almost immediately becomes outdated – so why spend the money in the first place?

·         Documentation does not deliver directly visible results to the business – other priorities dictate to undertake ‘real’ projects instead

 

We provide a practical and effective solution to establish control over documentation. We also offer an automated system documentation solution that fundamentally changes the way IT systems are documented. Our solution overcomes all of the above objections to (and difficulties of) typical documentation projects.


A New Way of IT Documentation 

For more than half a century, original documentation of IT applications was created during the traditional Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC), as part of the development project. Much of this documentation was created by the same programmers who wrote the application and more often than not, it contains a simple reiteration of programming logic and system components (e.g. ‘this program calls the following modules’, ‘this program writes the following files’, etc.). In many instances, business documentation makes up less than 5% of the application documentation and it is often not even connected to the implementing IT objects. This process of system documentation is the direct cause of today’s issues. 


Over the years, typically less and less effort was spent on keeping this documentation up to date, as the task has gradually become larger and larger. As a result, most IT professionals treat the actual code as the only valid documentation. Consequently, for any analysis task, typical programmers spend hours, days and weeks browsing through application code. Indeed, some programmers almost know the code by heart.


These are the very programmers whose time has become so precious that multi-million dollar projects literally hang in the balance of their availability and significant business decisions are made based on possible resource allocation scenarios.

 

Mapador’s System Documentation solution elegantly and automatically combines all component, relationship and dependency information, directly extracted from application artifacts (i.e. programs, copybooks, database definitions, file descriptors, etc.) and relates those to available business, architecture or other documents. The resulting, comprehensive documentation can be viewed on-line, via an intranet interface or printed out if necessary.

 

Application documentation, in a standard format across platforms and languages, can be produced for one-time purposes (for example to answer the need of M&A or outsourcing projects) or be automatically kept current, corresponding to actual production code. Paper-based documentation can also be produced if and when needed, but such printed material would be automatically up to date at print time and can be kept at a minimum.     

 

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