I've been given a mess of applications that all touch various common files and data sources. (Retail IT environment so lots of generic sources of data that gets sliced and diced into various ways and shoved into other locations after modification.)
To help myself and the next guy after me I'm going to start capturing all the inputs and outputs for each application as they need code changes. Foo.4gl logs to foo.log.DATE, spits out a report /var/tmp/foo.report, and reads from database table BAR.
The wall I've hit is I can't figure out what's the best machine readable format to store that info. I want to at least start mapping the interdependencies but so far the "best" I can figure for portability is a text file with inputs and outputs in with the source code. Low tech but that way it's right there for the developer to see when they touch the code.
Anyone have any better recomendations? Open source solutions for capturing the interdependencies? Standard notation for representing those webs?
Troux isn't feasible due to cost and admin needs. This is legacy spaghetti applications so I'm having to start from scratch without much but my own efforts to work with.
