If you’ve been running mission-critical applications on IBM Power for any length of time, you’ll know the challenge: the code works, but nobody alive today has a complete picture of what it does, how its components talk to each other, or where the hidden dependencies lurk. Documentation is out of date — if it exists at all. The knowledge lives in the heads of people who are, in many cases, no longer with your organisation.
This is the problem IBM Bob was built to solve
Why IBM i discovery is so hard
Mission-critical RPG estates have been growing for decades. As a result, most of them contain layers of code written by people who have since retired. In addition, internal documentation rarely keeps pace with the code itself. Therefore, when a modernisation programme begins, the first six months often disappear into discovery. By contrast, IBM Bob compresses that timeline into hours.
AI-driven application mapping
Bob’s application mapping capability uses AI to perform a deep structural analysis of your RPG codebase — RPG II, III, IV, and ILE — tracing dependencies, data flows, and call chains across your entire estate. Within hours, not months, you have a clear, accurate map of how your applications are structured and how they interact. As a result, modernisation teams stop guessing and start planning.
Living documentation, generated automatically
Rather than relying on stale wikis or tribal knowledge, IBM Bob generates living documentation as it works. Each module gets a plain-English explanation of what it does, what data it touches, and why it matters. Moreover, this documentation is updated in real time as Bob progresses through your estate. In practice, your team finally has a reference that reflects the code as it stands today, not five years ago.
Why this matters for IBM i teams
For IBM i teams preparing to modernise, this capability changes the conversation. You can’t modernise what you don’t understand. Therefore, the first question on any RPG modernisation programme should be: do we actually know what we have? IBM Bob makes sure the answer is yes. This applies whether you are migrating to Java, refactoring RPG in place, or simply trying to reduce key-person risk before a retirement wave hits.
What early adopters are finding
Early adopters report uncovering undocumented call chains spanning decades. For example, one financial services client identified 47 hidden program dependencies that had been causing intermittent transaction failures. Another manufacturing firm reduced its application discovery phase from six months to under two weeks. By contrast with static analysis tools, IBM Bob learns patterns across your entire IBM i estate. As a result, it flags dead code, circular references, and risky data flows before they cause incidents.
