Market leader for automated documentation of SAP® individual programs

Documentation core banking system software

The experts from Sysparency have been working with the international automotive group on the implementation of digitization topics for several years.

The challenge for the financial institution was to optimize business processes, replace existing inventory solutions that had evolved over time and meet regulatory requirements.

The initial situation of the project was the failure of the major replacement project of the central core financial application. This inglorious project termination put an undue strain on the bank’s budget and a new failure had to be avoided at all costs.

In addition, the minimum regulatory requirements for documentation of the core financial application now had to be met.

The activities in the project ranged from code analysis, evaluation and documentation (reverse engineering) to the implementation of specialist and IT workshops, coordination, decision and result meetings, to the incorporation of all technical and specialist inputs into the result types .

The result

The management commissioned Sysparenny with the creation of an automated software documentation of the core financial application. Instead of the internally estimated thousands of man-days of documentation effort, Sysparency was able to deliver the documentation within a fraction of the effort and time.

The sysparency documentation was used by the replacement project as the basis for the completeness of the new specification. Thus, the risk of another failure due to the complexity of the existing system could be excluded.

Savings potential:
€ 100 million
Project Cost:
€ 2.5 million
Project duration:
24 Months

The documentation has been expanded to include the specified transactions and the batch for all result types. The acceptance of the overall result was successful due to the content-related, structural and regulatory validation by management, specialist staff, IT and the compliance department. This project result is the basis for the overall documentation of the system.

Specific results

  • Besonderer Mehrwert der aktuellen fachlichen Dokumentation ist die klare und strukturierte Führung durch den Geschäftsprozess für den Anwender
  • The technical documentation has now a clear structure for the developer, which leads to an easier navigation within the individual topics, when accessing the document or a training course
  • The interface documentation now shows an overview of all communication channels from and to the leasing system as well as branches of the individual communication objects
  • Fulfillment of the compliance guidelines

Reverse engineering

Sysparency uses qualified tools for the reverse engineering process. The corresponding reverse engineering tools are individually adapted and, if necessary, expanded for each project. The aim of the tool support is to create a model representation of the software and to generate the different parts of the documentation from this. Reverse engineering includes the following tasks:

  • Inventory
  • measurement
  • Post documentation
  • Repository
  • Documentation generation
  • (manual) addition of documents

Inventory

This sub-task includes, for example. the collection of existing documentation, familiarization with the system or a system archeology. It makes sense to carry out a business analysis before this process and to decide on the procedure and scope.

measurement

The entire code of the system was measured on the basis of various parameters.

Post documentation

The result types of the documentation are subdivided as follows:

  • Technical documentation
  • Technical Documentation
  • Interface documentation
Technical documentation

The technical documentation is based on a requirements analysis according to the IREB © standard. The respective training documents, technical concepts and work instructions for the preparation of the workshops as well as the results of the workshop sessions served as a basis.

Technical Documentation

The technical documentation consists of an automated developer documentation and a semi-automated functional documentation.

The automated developer documentation analyzes database schemes, identifies business rules and generates aggregated logical content.

The semi-automated functional documentation identifies mathematical calculations and formulas in the code, carries out a variable mapping and extracts data flows and business rules.

Interface documentation

The interface documentation contains software-supported call trees which, based on each transaction, list all main programs with their called sub-programs. This documentation also identifies internal and external interfaces and assigns transactions to the programs for the databases and their segments. The interfaces are categorized using different data transmission standards.

Repository

The analysis results were saved in a reusable repository.

Generation of the documents

The result documents of the project were generated both automatically and manually. The technical documentation was e.g. created manually. Most of the technical documentation was created automatically, with the exception of additions.

Supplement documents

This sub-task includes tasks such as adding manual quality controls or generally adding information to all types of results.

Interested or have further questions?

Arrange a no-obligation initial consultation with our SYSPARENCY experts.

We will introduce you to our products and answer all your questions in a straightforward online meeting.