Visual Expert

Features

• Code exploration: call graphs, CRUD matrix, cross-references, dependency graphs.
• Software documentation: a documentation generator produces technical documentation and low-level design descriptions.
• Code comparison: finds differences between several versions of the same code.
• Automated code review: calculates software metrics and source lines of code. Finds unused objects and methods. Identifies duplicate objects. Controls naming conventions.

  Usage

• Change impact analysis: evaluating the consequences of a change in the code or in a database. Avoiding negative side effects when evolving a system.
• Program comprehension: helping programmers understand and maintain existing code, or modernize legacy systems. Transferring knowledge of the code, from one programmer to another.
• Software sizing: calculating the size of an application, or a piece of code, in order to estimate development efforts.
• Code review: auditing source code, in order to discover issues, such as dead code, code causing poor performances or violations of programming conventions.

  Limitations

• As a static code analyzer, Visual Expert is limited to the programming languages supported by its code parsers - Oracle PL/SQL, SQL Server Transact-SQL, PowerBuilder.
• A preliminary reverse engineering is required, with a duration depending on the size of the code parsed. Users must wait for the parsing completion prior to using the features, or schedule it in advance.
• Visual Expert is based on a client/server architecture: the code analysis is running on a windows PC - preferably a server. The information extracted from the code is stored in a RDBMS, communicating with a client application installed on the programmer’s computer - no web client is available. This requires that the code, the parsers, the RDBMS and the programmers’ computers are connected to the same LAN or VPN.

  History

• 1995- 1998 - Prog and Doc - Initial version distributed on the French market
• 2001 - Visual Expert 4.5
• 2003 - Visual Expert 5
• 2007 - Visual Expert 5.7
• 2010 - Visual Expert 6.0
• 2015 - Visual Expert 2015 - Server component added to schedule code analyses
• 2016 - Visual Expert 2016 - New Oracle PL/SQL code parser
• 2017 - Visual Expert 2017 - Code comparison, CRUD matrix, SQL Server T-SQL code parser