Graph Technology Fuels Rapid Development of IT Architecture Visibility Solution

Challenge

With digital transformation, companies have more and more applications at their disposal
that support business activities. Organizations, in turn, also face multiple problems: software
is increasingly complex, solutions are quickly obsolete and development team turnover is
significant. These situations naturally raise issues around knowledge transfer and maintenance
of installed systems.

Damien Charlemagne, Group Product Manager, explains: “CAST technology is the product of
a cumulative R&D investment of nearly 200 million euros over 25 years and is to engineering
software what MRI is to medicine – a unique, fast, non-intrusive investigative capability that’s
extremely precise.”

To provide visibility into the development of these applications and systems, CAST offers
software intelligence – or, insight into complex software structures.

“In order to have real visibility of all the software components of a company, the solution that
seemed to be the most appropriate was graphs, in particular, because they allow us not only
to see all the components but also to identify the different relationships between them,” said
Charlemagne.

“The problem is that these relationships are extremely numerous and had no real logic. The
graph database seemed to be the solution: it’s easy to use and allows quick analysis of all these
relationships via a powerful query capability.”

Solution

The first version was released as a web application. The CAST application scans a customer’s
systems and code, and then gives users web-based visualization of all their software projects and
components.

Following the example of Google Maps, which allows a top-down view with the possibility to
zoom into street-level, the CAST Software solution offers the same type of functionality for
software – a vision of the general architecture down to the level of a line of code.

Now development teams can obtain accurate and usable information from potentially millions of
lines of code to become productive within a very short period of time.

In the CAST Imaging System, each software component is represented by a node. And for a
hundred nodes, there are potentially several thousand relationships the solution can highlight.
This also allows for better internal collaboration around complex software systems.