A better way to understand your IBM i applications, make maintenance easy & move projects forward faster
Gaining full understanding of your IBM i code, and accurately undertaking impact analysis can be a challenge.
If you try to make these decisions without all the information and details you need, you’re likely to see an increase in development costs, as well as an increase in the risk involved in making changes to your applications, and have more difficulty in onboarding new developers.
Eliminate the guesswork and make changes to IBM i (AS400) code with confidence
Using X-Analysis View (previously Fresche View), you can have a detailed view of your entire IBM i environment.
X-Analysis View gives you automated, graphical documentation and enables you to conduct in-depth, cross-application impact analysis.
Using X-Analysis View, you are able to:
- Make development faster
- Cut down maintenance costs
- Quickly and accurately estimate projects
- Ensure testing efforts are focused on the right areas
- Speed up new developer onboarding.
Transcript:
When you’re making changes to your IBM i applications, how confident are you that nothing will break? And how long does it take you to get a new developer ramped up, so they feel comfortable making any code or database changes?
Most IBM i shops aren’t happy with either of those answers.
The good news is, you no longer have to leave code changes to chance, with new FrescheView, an IBM i application discovery and understanding solution by Fresche.
Developers and less-technical staff, such as business analysts, get unparalleled insight into your RPG and COBOL applications, to better enhance and evolve them.
Powered by 20 years of proven X-Analysis technology, FrescheView is more than a cross-reference tool. It gives you interactive, graphical documentation, in-depth impact analysis and automated data modelling. This deeper understanding of your IBM i leads to informed decisions, that help meet the needs of your business.
IBM i shops benefit from FrescheView because it speeds up RPG and COBOL development, reduces application maintenance costs and risk, helps you estimate projects more accurately shows you where to focus application testing, and is invaluable in helping you quickly onboard new developers.
Now, let’s take a closer look.
FrescheView is fully integrated into RDI and gives you a windows-based, graphical view of your applications, to help you understand the design and flow. You can start by what you know and then drill up or down to what you need to know. For example, data-flow diagrams make it easy, even for non-programmers, to visualise and understand how information from files comes in or out of a programme. Not only what programmes use it, but how they use it, and what info they use. FrecheView is a must-have for onboarding new developers. They no longer have to rely on outdated documentation or tie up senior developers with so many questions and they can explore applications autonomously and contribute faster.
Another way to discover information about your system is by looking at a relational data model. It is very time-consuming to create a data model from the ground-up and extending applications without it is very risky. Thankfully, FrescheView creates the data model for your IBM i application databases automatically, by extracting data from the GDS, database objects, and application code. In this filtered view of the data model, we see the customer file and all the related tables to it. One of the most powerful features in FescheView is Impact Analysis. It tracks where user information, starting from a single field or variable through all iterations and associated variables and fields in every programme that uses them.
Now, let’s say we need to make our customer group field longer. A simple level-one analysis would show us using 67 lines of source code. If we drill down to level two, we now see numbers increase and we start looking at and tracking parameters – we’re now at 119. How many of these locations would you have found? and how long would it have taken you?
FrescheView helps provide more accurate effort estimation and deliver higher-quality code to end-users, faster.
Posted by Joe on 14th April 2020.