Multiplayer Software Inc., the developer of a collaborative tool for software design of backend systems, announced today that its platform is now generally available after being in beta test mode since February.

In addition to the general availability launch, the new toolset includes a beta observability feature for system architecture. This feature automatically documents technical decisions made by information technology teams as they work. This eliminates the need for manual notes or separate documentation, as everything is captured and recorded by the platform in real time.

Multiplayer was the brainchild of developers and built by developers to fill a gap in the market as a collaborative tool purpose-built for multilayered and complicated systems that exist in many company’s operations. It’s designed to replace the multiple tools that many software and IT teams use to collaborate with a single tool and provide a “single point of truth” that they can refer back to for both code and system architecture.

“Our users fall into two camps — those who aren’t doing any documentation, which has enormous security risks, and those who are documenting things manually, which is tedious and a waste of time,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Steph Johnson. “With Multiplayer, teams don’t have to spend any time on documentation. Every change to the platform is captured and retained.”

For example, as a system is being built by a team, both development and operations, often referred to as DevOps, need a holistic view of the system architecture including system architecture and application programming interface documentation, as well as the changes to code repositories, components, dependencies and integrations.

Multiplayer’s existing features include the ability to share designs, discuss architectural changes and give feedback about modifications before making those decisions. The platform is visual at its core and allows remote teams to see how the changes will affect distributed system architectures and roll them back using version control systems. Views can be changed to support different team needs, including development, architects, quality assessment and others depending on the area of expertise.

With this type of collaborative, highly visual interface, increased observability and the auto-documentation feature, Multiplayer seeks to lower technical debt and management overhead for DevOps teams. This is the day-to-day tedium and time wasted on attempting to wrangle with understanding what’s needed to solve problems and manage assets.

According to a report from global business consulting company Protiviti technical debt represents, on average, 30% of the IT budget and more than 20% of the IT human resources budget of most organizations. A majority of this debt comes from decisions made during the design process, Multiplayer said, and having access to observability features and good documentation can go a long way to relieving that burden.

“When changes aren’t tracked, bad things happen — bad code, redundancy, technical debt, a lack of cohesion and the risk of losing everything when a key person walks out the door,” said Chief Technology Officer Thomas Johnson. “We’ve removed the need to manually create and update system documentation so your actual running system can be your source of truth.”

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