Introduction

This step should always be executed as part of the first time analysis of an application performed during the on-boarding with CAST AIP. When re-analyzing an application, this step is considered optional and it is not always required unless the differences between subsequent source code deliveries highlight significant changes in the application that require partial or full re-onboarding of the application.

It is considered good practice to routinely re-validate the configuration of an application anyway. The frequency of such a quality check depends on the frequency of reanalysis and may be triggered but key events linked to the IT configuration change management process (e.g. refactoring, consolidations, etc.)

Once the analysis is complete, the generated log files need to be reviewed to verify that no error or warning which may impact the quality of the results have been detected. For each of the technologies supported by CAST, the log manager will produce a set of statistics to verify the analysis and compare this to the previous analysis. Furthermore, the Dynamic Links need to be verified as well as the display in the CAST Engineering Dashboard. For both there are tools that are supportive for the final technical validation.

Review the Analysis Log and resolve or understand reported issue

To review the Analysis Log, navigate to each analysis execution item and then click the log link:

Review the more common warning / errors as described in the table below:

In addition, you can view all Analysis logs using the following option in the CAST Management Studio, Application editor:

Validate analysis boundary

The objective is to ensure that what has been analyzed and mapped into the Analysis Services as objects and links is consistent with the intent and scope of the analysis configuration.

For the purpose of this validation, the CAST Admin should try to generate a preliminary CAST Engineering Dashboard (taking a snapshot) as soon as all log issues are resolved. A few cursory checks can help to easily pinpoint issues with the source code discovery tool, or other configuration issues. The CAST Admin should, as a minimum, perform the following comparisons: 

• Files by technology and Line of Code (LOC) delivered* vs Files by technology and LOC analyzed 
• Use Execution Unit Report to check the number of artifacts produced vs those delivered and/or expected
• Perform a cursory check of CAST Engineering Dashboard results - you can do so by launching a temporary CAST Engineering Dashboard from the Application editor > Execute tab:
  

Viewing Analysis Unit content

To inspect the results of the analysis for each Analysis Unit, you can view the content of the Analysis Unit - see figure below:

This displays the following data you can use to compare to the information gathered during the application qualification and delivery validation steps:

Viewing Execution Unit content

To view the Execution Unit content, right click the Application name > Execute > Analysis > View execution unit:

This will open an execution report that will display the lines of code in the Analysis Service for each Analysis Unit. Compare this with LOC count from tools such as SCLOC to validate the analysis configuration:

Click to enlarge

Validating the quality of an analysis

The analysis can be validated in a variety of ways:

• By reviewing the log files generated by the different tools invoked during the analysis
• By checking if expected objects and links have been correctly saved - this can be achieved using CAST Enlighten

Validate module configuration