WHAT DOES LACK OF UNDERSTANDING CAUSE?

Your team needs to know the architecture of your software without doubts. If you happen to be in a company with tens of developers and years of history, the sad fact is that only a few team members, if any, have a good understanding of the whole software asset. This lack of knowledge causes many issues that we often see in big, long running software projects:

• Delayed releases
• Feature development takes longer than expected
• Software maintenance is slow and tedious
• Touching certain parts of the code is avoided because they usually break
• The same “gurus” are always needed to solve the most critical issues

WHY ARE WE IN THIS SITUATION?

We could easily blame the current trends of software development. Ever shortening time-to-market requirements shift the focus into pushing out new features, at the cost of long term architectural quality and maintainability. Documentation is ignored and it doesn’t keep up well anyway if done manually. Technical debt is increasing because there is not enough time to focus on quality while developing new features. On the other hand there is also not enough architectural understanding, which is key for any refactoring. It takes long for new developers to learn the asset and become productive. Reading thru millions of lines of code isn’t even possible. Old lead architects might be jumping to new challenges and knowledge is leaking out of the company. The simple fact is that every day your software asset is getting bigger and more complex, paving the way for troubles. On the other hand, your company must keep up with the markets so you can’t just stop the train for months and fix the issues at once.

WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?

Hiring more experts to fix the problems might sound appealing. This would mean raising costs though. In fact, more people means more complexity too, which is not what we wanted. How about fixing the root cause instead? Increase the understanding of your team by providing them with automated, always up to date visual architecture model. This model would show the full software architecture, navigable to smallest details and dependencies. It brings the system level understanding of the head architect to the less experienced developers. Key benefits of architecture visualization:

• Let QA and developers easily see what has changed since last release or since last week
• Show the hotspots that require continuous fixing
• Save days and weeks in finding and communicating refactoring needs
• Dramatically speed up the learning curve for new team members
• All relevant information in one place, always up to date

When everyone is talking about the same picture of the software, their system understanding starts raising. By time it will address most of the issues listed above.

With our solution you get the same benefits for everyone, with a single price. Please see the video below for a short demo and contact customerservice@softagram.com to schedule a meeting. Let’s visualise your software!