Nonstop Documentation with TIC Navigator

As we gear up for our annual gathering at TBC, there’s the usual sense of excitement and purpose in the Nonstop community. This event is more than just a tradition—it’s an occasion for collaboration, learning, and strategy for the Nonstop platform, which continues to deliver the industry’s best TCO. Together, we share ideas, celebrate success stories, address shared challenges. And here are three core challenges that seem to resonate every Nonstop user.

Challenges

The Retirement Wave. Experienced Nonstop experts in both development and system management are retiring.  With each departure, organizations are losing decades of irreplaceable institutional knowledge.

How to Bring in the Next Generation. As teams welcome new, often less experienced members, ramp-up is slow and painful. Mostly, it is attributed to scattered, incomplete or nonexistent documentation. “Studying the code” or “learning on the job” are not the most productive paths for the new team members to get up to speed.

Risky Modernization. To ensure Nonstop’s continued success, we must embrace new technologies—modern web UIs, standardized middleware, and increased automation. There is no lack of modernization tools for Nonstop. But modernization is impossible without first understanding the business logic, system design, and dependencies of the original code. Otherwise, there could be costly risks in investing in a modernized replacement that does not address the needs at tall.

What connects all these challenges? The urgent need for reliable and accessible system knowledge.  This is the area we at TIC Software have focused on for the past year. That’s why we’re proud to introduce Navigator—our AI-powered knowledge platform built for Nonstop environments.

Navigator automates documentation generation and much more

Navigator is a smarter, faster way to unlock the business logic, workflows, and high-level design across your Nonstop codebase. With the use of GenAI LLM, Navigator analyzes COBOL, TAL/pTAL, C/C++, and TACL codebases, identifying patterns and system relationships across applications.

Navigator synthesizes documentation, high-level diagrams, even interactive chat capabilities—enabling anyone on your team to query the inner workings of a program beyond what is in each code statement. Instead of just summarizing code line by line, Navigator captures business rules, data access flows, and design rationales that are otherwise hidden—serving a purpose for both the business analyst and the technical developer.

How Navigator Addresses Nonstop’s Challenges

Capture Institutional Knowledge
Navigator makes it easy to generate documentation from the codebase. Also, by engaging your senior experts in reviewing and enriching Navigator’s outputs, you now can capture critical know-how before the SME walks out the door. The combination of Navigator and “SME in the Loop” guarantees accurate system knowledge in the documentation.

Accelerate Onboarding
With Navigator, new developers can understand codebases, system procedures, and business intent faster. The AI-powered chat interface gives them personalized and on-demand answers. This benefits not only new developers, but the whole development team including senior members.

Enable Modernization
With business logic and process flows unlocked, opportunities open up for modernization projects. Navigator reveals where code can evolve, what can be standardized, and how to rearchitect with new technologies.

No documentation? It’s Time to Take Action!

Most Nonstop users voice that a “lack of (good) documentation)” hinders the whole organization’s productivity. This can be remedied by the right leadership decision because we now have the right technical solution with Navigator. In the past, managers assumed documentation was just a time-consuming checklist – “nice to have” until things went wrong. Today, the stakes are different and higher. With talent turnover, knowledge capture isn’t overhead—it’s a requirement to ensure Nonstop operation, productivity, and progress. TIC Navigator delivers ROI from day one by freeing up developer time, minimizing interruption of valuable SME resources, and speeding up the onboarding process.

We’re excited to showcase Navigator at TBC and share how it works to solve Nonstop’s most pressing needs. We invite you to connect with us at TBC, reach out with your challenges and see how Navigator can solve them.

Meanwhile, please explore our website https://ticsoftware.ai for more information, and register for one of our upcoming TIC Navigator webinars.