SAFA supports various use cases to augment & automate your documentation practices. Some of the functionality mentioned below is not available through our Self-Service Platform, but can be leveraged via our Full-Service Offering.
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Scenario: 2 developers have joined the team, a newbie and a veteran, and they have been given their first tasks. It doesn't make sense to review the whole system, but you need to be familiar enough to get started. This means asking experienced team members, looking through folders and documentation, building a mental model, and reviewing code. Time to first commit can range anywhere from hours to weeks; even then, different tasks will require understanding different contexts.
Solution: SAFA gets you to the understanding you need when you need it. Engineers are immediately presented with a general overview of their software system capturing key functionality, entities, dataflow, and sub-systems. When you need to dive deeper, SAFA automagically clusters your code to generate upstream documentation, such as features and functional requirements. Our automated traceability ensures that all of your data sources, like ticketing systems, are traced into the documentation and code. Everything you need to start innovating is right at your fingertips.
As you improve or add new features, SAFA will summarize changes in natural language, to help you quickly understand any system impacts. Change summaries can be tailored for technical or non-technical stakeholders, ensuring everyone is on the same page. Whether you are working on a new codebase, or coming back to an old one, using SAFA as your Onboarding Assistant ensures you have the right context to keep moving quickly.
Scenario: An engineering team is tasked with updating or integrating a legacy system. Unfortunately, the documentation is incomplete and stale, requiring a manual review of the architecture; this may take your team of engineers days to months, depending on the size and complexity of the system.
Solution: SAFA allows your team to accelerate time to value at the click of a (few) button(s). By ingesting your entire code base, SAFA’s LLM pipeline extracts functional information about that code base. From code and function-level summaries to functional requirements and beyond, SAFA intelligently clusters all of your code’s functionality to get you up to speed quickly.
All of the generated content can be tailored for specific applications, and interactive visualizations allow you to quickly traverse the code and related documentation. Using SAFA as your Reverse Engineering Assistant gets rid of those frustrating days and nights understanding the spaghetti.
Scenario: An organization is adding new features and making significant modifications to an existing software system. Any change in one part of the system could have cascading effects. Documentation is somewhat up to date, but with the quick pace of development, you cannot predict the full impact of new changes. You are tasked with managing the change impact process to reduce the chance of cascading failures, which could set development back by months and increase costs significantly.
Solution: SAFA gives your team a head start at identifying and understanding how changes will impact your system. For a specific PR or between releases, SAFA distills the key changes into a non-technical overview using the context of your entire system. Product and engineering managers can review without having to dive into the code, or more granular technical changes of what has been added, modified, and removed can be surfaced.
With SAFA monitoring relationships across code and documentation, it understands the interdependencies of your system. Interactive visualizations allow you to quickly explore dependencies, such as what documentation may need to be updated after a change, or what other features of the system may have been affected. Impacted documentation can be regenerated, to account for any new functionality or changes. Using SAFA as your Change Impact Assistant allows you to innovate with confidence, and avoid bringing down prod.
Scenario: An organization’s software has evolved over several years, leading to fragmented, outdated, or missing documentation. Your developers are spending excessive time deciphering the existing codebase rather than developing it. Your task is to update and continually maintain the documentation, but you need to figure out where to start.
Solution: SAFA carries the lion’s share of maintaining documentation for Individual Contributors. From the get-go, SAFA generates up-to-date documentation for the entire system. For changes moving forward, SAFA understands how your system is evolving and appropriately creates or updates your documentation in a standardized format.