What Visual Expert users say
Project managers, developers and support engineers describe how Visual Expert helps them understand, change and document the applications they are responsible for.
Customer story
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
The Bureau of Application Development builds and maintains the agency's software, developed with PowerBuilder, ColdFusion and Java, and remains responsible for the systems it creates.
Using VE's features allows a much quicker turnaround, reduces expenses and frees up resources for more productive work.
The need
Maintenance and documentation, mostly due to frequent staff turnover. In the team's experience, between 50% and 60% of the effort on a system occurs after its implementation.
How the team uses it
The project manager verifies and documents each reported problem. Developers then use Visual Expert to identify the code to modify, and validate modifications with an impact analysis before implementation.
The result
New staff quickly find the problem spots in systems they do not know. Documentation is accurate and can be refreshed in a few clicks after maintenance.
Read the full customer storyArticle in PowerBuilder Developer Journal (PDF)
Find the cause of a problem
I was amazed at how quickly I was able to pinpoint the problem area and fix it.
“I recently became responsible for making changes to a complex PowerBuilder application created by a developer that left the company (…) After a difficult couple of days trying to wade through the code, I installed Visual Expert and used it to explore the code.”
A customer of ours sent me his large application, because of some strange problem that he had. Using Visual Expert (…) I was able to get to the root of the problem. Excellent!
Change code with less risk
If only there was a tool that would do the time-consuming drudgework we all loathe, so we can make better decisions and get changes into production more quickly with less risk. Now you can. With Visual Expert.
I'm a believer, a Visual Expert believer.
“We had to make some major enhancements to a PB system. This is the type of task where the carefully planned inheritance structure of the system usually goes to pot. You see some code that is almost what you need, but you duplicate rather than extending it, for fear of fouling up something that is already running well (…) this seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to really put the tool to the test.”
Get to know an unfamiliar application
I cannot remember so powerful a tool that allows a user to become familiar with a new application in literally a few hours.
“The more you work with Visual Expert, the more you understand how convenient it is.”
Visual Expert is a convenient and simple tool that manages to combine all the information regarding an application, no matter how big it is, and present it in such a way that even people not familiar with the application will gain a basic understanding of the application structure.
Visual Expert is used by hundreds of large organizations in banking, finance, insurance, government, industry, media, software, telecom and transportation.
See what Visual Expert shows on your own PowerBuilder, Oracle or SQL Server code.