From days to minutes: How CAST achieved greater software intelligence with graph technology

Imagine cutting down the time it takes to extract key intelligence from your software architecture in half - ultimately leading to faster insights in just minutes rather than days. At CAST, their tool is helping their customers do just that and more. 

CAST provides products that generate software intelligence, with a technology based on semantic analysis of software source code and components. Their technology automatically "understands" custom-built software systems and provides insights into their inner workings with MRI-like precision.

To achieve greater software intelligence, CAST needed a solution that could handle the complexities of today’s modern software systems in terms of both volume and performance. And for Olivier Bonsignour, Head of Product at CAST, leveraging Linkurious’ product, Ogma, an all-in-one JavaScript library for large-scale graph visualizations, helped them to achieve this much faster and with greater ease.

For many organizations, gaining clearer insights into the core structures of their systems can often be time-consuming and complex, making it challenging to trace dependencies across different layers and components. Additionally, software systems can change rapidly, with new applications and dependencies being added or removed frequently. Without the right tools, it can be challenging to keep track of these changes and maintain an up-to-date map of the software system.

With a tool such as CAST Imaging, which provides a living knowledge base of an application’s inner workings with everything from its data and code elements to relationships and transaction flows, it allows developers to gain insights into the different interactions and interdependencies that make up today’s modern software systems. It enables businesses to optimize performances, identify potential issues, and make more informed decisions around software development and maintenance.

CAST Imaging leverages Ogma, the all-in-one JavaScript library for large-scale interactive graph visualizations. By leveraging graph technology, mapping different software dependencies becomes much easier and faster to use and gain real insights from. It provides a powerful and flexible way to model, analyze, and visualize complex relationships between software components. In fact, one CAST client even noted that what once was taking 3-4 days to accomplish could now be done in just 3-4 hours. 

In addition to Ogma, CAST primarily leverages SQL (PostGres) and Cypher to retrieve data along with Python, Java, and Go as their applications backend to translate their data to Ogma's format, and finally Ogma, React, and JavaScript for their frontend.

CAST also needed technology that could scale and keep up with large amounts of ever-evolving data. The complexities of mapping different software dependencies meant that at times, a single node could have up to 125 different relationships. And with high expectations from end users in terms of performance, producing results in over 5 seconds would simply be too slow. 

In addition, CAST has been able to leverage Ogma’s Playground to enhance testing capabilities and communication with the Linkurious support team. “It helps simplify communication since you’re able to develop an example in the Playground that support can use to understand the problem, faster,” said Olivier Bonsignour.

Delivering an exceptional user experience for CAST is also key. “Ease-of-use and implementation is important. It isn’t complicated and Ogma is well-designed for our use case and straightforward to use. Plus, when CAST Imaging is used to onboard new users in a team, we found that it reduces learning time by 10-20%,” said Olivier Bonsignour.

For CAST, leveraging graph technology to help their clients achieve greater software intelligence was a clear-cut choice. “We could not do what we do today without this kind of technology,” says Olivier Bonsignour, “and what we can achieve with Ogma in terms of display and aesthetics of the solution is important to our overall success.” Graph technology has continued to shape the way organizations are able to leverage their connected data with everything from data lineage and cyber-security use cases to process mining and beyond. For companies such as CAST, leveraging this technology is only going to become increasingly crucial in staying ahead of the curve in this data-driven age.

Ogma is a commercial JavaScript library that can be leveraged to develop powerful, large-scale interactive graph visualizations for your applications. No matter your specifications, Ogma comes equipped with everything you need to easily visualize and analyze your graph data and increase your productivity across the board. 

With Ogma, you can display and interact with thousands of nodes and edges in a matter of seconds, create rich experiences that allow any user to make sense of the complex networks in your business, and leverage ready-to-use examples and tutorials to cut down on development time and focus on what you want to deliver.

Learn more about Ogma here.