Simplifying Application Discovery with Hatha
Systems Knowledge Refinery

Your applications don’t just run your business – they are your business.

But while the business rules and business processes contained within your applications have steadily evolved alongside your business and IT strategies, the same can’t always be said for their supporting documentation.

So in order to simplify the process of adding features, performing maintenance, and onboarding new team members, it’s imperative that you do everything you can to enable development staff to understand your applications and how they contribute to your organization’s success.

That’s why many clients have prioritized application discovery efforts. The high-level goal of an application discovery project is to uncover and understand application functionality, so you’re better equipped to:

• Extend, evolve, and integrate your applications
• Identify application dependencies and interfaces
• Clean up dead and duplicate code, as well as other anomalies
• Discover code that doesn’t meet your standards
• Gain the insight needed to develop better, more comprehensive test cases
• Find the logic necessary to expose parts of the application as a service
• Gain greater control over the development process
  

But here’s the catch: It took you years to build your applications, and they’re not going to give up their
secrets easily.

Application discovery requires the right tooling to be successful.

Introducing Hatha Systems Knowledge Refinery

Developed by our partner Hatha Systems®, Hatha Systems Knowledge Refinery® (Hatha KR) is a platform and set of tools designed to assist your application analysis efforts.

Using Hatha KR, you can parse source files – such as COBOL, ALGOL, C programs, database schema (DASDL or OS2200 DDLs), and WFL or ECL – place the code into a standards-based Knowledge Discovery Model, and make the results available for further examination.

As you parse your programs and build your Knowledge Discovery Model, you’ll be able to take advantage of the following core capabilities:

• Navigation: Parsing programs breaks them down into composite and elementary items showing application and data flow. From this point, you can easily see all declarations and paragraphs. Clicking a paragraph displays entry and exit flow as an outline or as statement details. Data flow is provided in a similar way, as well. Plus, you can find which variables update other variables, making it easy to determine the impact of a change throughout the application.
• Program flow: You’re also able to analyze program flow. You can see flow as execution moves forward through the program or view it in reverse. Additionally, you’ll have access to charts showing paragraph flow or flow through the entire program.
• Query language: You’ll be able to utilize a number of out-of-the-box queries, all of which can be used to analyze code and determine whether it meets your standards. You’re free to write your own queries either from scratch or by using one of the built-in queries as a starting point, too.
• Business rules and documentation: With Hatha KR, you can provide terms that are likely to be used in a business rule and ask the platform to deliver a list of “candidate” rules. You can then review the list to determine which are actual business rules, mark the rules, and place the code in a container. Once this is done, you’re free to add documentation to the identified business rules.

Aside from these key features, you can use Hatha KR to find duplicated code at varying levels of sensitivity. You can produce a matrix of source dependencies, or view reports and metrics on languages, lines of code, complexity, range use, and many other topics. And you can easily obtain information detailing the impact of any proposed change to your applications.

We’re Here to Help

Hatha KR is a powerful platform – and one that may require some getting used to before you can fully take advantage of all it has to offer.

To streamline your adoption of Hatha KR, we offer a number of services that can help you get started or even offload some of the effort to our team:

• Proof of Concept: We’ll analyze an application of your choice and note such items as program metrics, dead code, duplicated code, code anomalies, and service discovery.
• Compliance scanning: You can work with us to scan your code base to ensure it upholds your corporate standards, using either custom or out-of-the-box queries.
• Application documentation: We’ll perform a comprehensive analysis of your application in order to document it, understand inter- and intra-dependencies, and extract rules.
• Application health check: You’ll be able to identify and clean up dead, duplicate, and anomalous code.
• Data dictionary creation: We’ll extract and analyze data elements then consolidate them into a data dictionary.

These are just a handful of Hatha KR services our team offers. We’re also happy to customize a service engagement to your organization’s specific needs.

To learn more about Hatha KR and the services we offer around it, please contact your Unisys sales representative to request a demonstration.