The objective of Plan_IT is to help you understand the structure of your applications so that you can plan modifications and testing effectively. In many ways it is the partner to the Auto-analyse facility within Extract_IT that automatically analyses the database structure of an application.
This facility provides benefits in two main areas. Firstly, as Plan_IT automatically analyses the relationships between the programs, modules and files within an application, the impact of any proposed or actual change can be quantified prior to any development or testing. Secondly, as Plan_IT is totally integrated into the rest of TestBench it can give immediate access to the Test Cases suitable for exercising a particular program and automatically generate the Data, Comp and Warp Cases needed to create the test environment for that program.
Plan_IT creates an application model by taking a snapshot of an application rather than attempting to maintain a dynamic view of that application. The advantages of this technique are that the model continues to exist even when the application has been deleted and that the effect of altering a program or file can be modeled before a single line of code is changed.
Plan_IT uses actual object relationships to build the model so you do not need the source available. You may also tune and refine the model with extra information if this is known. You can analyse a number of libraries simultaneously to be included in one application model.
Once the Plan Case is built it gives you fast on-line access to information about objects in the system, as well as an overview of key components based on the number of times a program is called by others, or the scale of the updates in the database it performs.