Some form of documentation is an integral part of information system development, there is no way around it. However, the agile minded often see documentation as a waste of time and a bad solution to a real problem. Even if you haven’t signed the agile manifesto, you probably wouldn’t want to spend a considerable portion of the development budget for writing and updating documents. After all, information has to be shared somehow between everybody involved in development work. Is automatic documentation a possible answer to this dilemma?
Aino.io reduces the workload of manual documenting and makes documentation more connected with the development work of enterprise information systems.
Essential information for every individual
There is a lot of information related to any IT development project, and that information changes constantly. Traditionally software development has involved various stakeholders such as product and business owners, domain experts, architects, developers, testers, and users. These groups of people need information about the system for different purposes, but they also have to have a shared understanding to be able to work together.
When working with enterprise application integration, the number of applications involved and thus the number of stakeholders is greater. That is why fulfilling the need for information and a shared understanding becomes even more demanding.
Fortunately, every stakeholder doesn’t need to understand the inner workings of every piece of software. It is still valuable for most people to understand the system as a whole at a basic level. What are the applications that make up the enterprise information system? What are their roles and dependencies? How do they produce the wanted outcome?
But how can such a complex system be documented in an understandable and digestible way for all the stakeholders? Is it even possible to keep such documentation updated? Aino.io has a solution to make it easier.
Aino.io produces information from the source
We described earlier how increasing transparency of digital processes will benefit your company. From the development point of view, transparency of the digital processes is exactly what is needed to get a shared understanding of the enterprise information system as a whole. But what does this mean in practice?
We believe documentation should be based on the actual system that is operating in production. We also believe that it should be updated automatically. This is why we have built into Aino.io the capability to analyze and produce information from the live system.
Aino.io will automatically update all the statistics and visualizations as the system’s behaviour or structure changes over time. This greatly reduces the amount of manual documentation work and reduces the risk of having outdated documents.
How does Aino.io support automatic documentation?
Aino.io is able to document the structure of the information system, the interconnected applications, the business processes or operations the applications run, and so on. This is achieved by gathering the essential data from the integrations, the source.
For the integration developer, this means that they will specify once per integration what the essential data is and how it is stored into Aino.io. Whenever said integration takes part in a digital business process, the transaction data is sent to be processed and analyzed by Aino.io.
The data is aggregated and analyzed in near real-time, so that everybody in your organization can have a constantly updated view of the entire information system on the business process level. Detailed information about the individual data transactions is also available for anybody who needs it.
Manually documenting an information system on this level takes ages. Making sure everything is up-to-date would be nearly impossible. Automatic documentation features of Aino.io make it possible.