Application discovery and understanding (ADU) is the process of automatically analyzing artifacts of a software application and determining metadata structures associated with the application in the form of lists of data elements and business rules. The relationships discovered between this application and a central metadata registry is then stored in the metadata registry itself.

Business benefits of ADU

ADU saves a great deal of time and expense for organizations that are involved in the change control and impact analysis of complex computer systems.

Impact analysis allows managers to know that if specific structures are changed or removed altogether, what the impact of those changes might be to enterprise-wide systems.

ADU process

ADU software is usually written to scan the following application structures:

• RDBMS tables and columns
• Application source code
• User interfaces (searching for labels of forms)
• Reports

The output of the ADU process frequently includes:

• Lists of previously registered data elements discovered within an application
• List of unregistered data elements discovered

Note that a registered data element is any data element that already exists within a metadata registry

See also

• metadata
• metadata registry
• data element
• ASG-becubic
• EZ Legacy
• IBM Rational Asset Analyzer
• Mapador