BAY AREA AIR QUALITY MANAGEMENT DISTRICT
Comprehensive System Documentation Slashes Onboarding Time for Mission-Critical Government System
The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) is a regional air pollution control agency that regulates stationary sources of air pollution in the nine counties surrounding San Francisco Bay.
- Services
- Technical Documentation
- Technologies
- Sharepoint
- Code Editors
- Azure UX
- AI
Oshyn documents a complex government system covering hundreds of screens and more than 200 data tables, so new developers can hit the ground running.
The Challenge
When a manufacturing facility applies for an air quality permit or when compliance staff verifies that a business is meeting its emissions limits, that work is done within the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD)'s Permit & Compliance System (PCS). For an agency responsible for regulating air pollution across nine Bay Area counties, keeping PCS running ensures that BAAQMD protects air quality for millions of residents.
PCS is a sprawling platform with hundreds of screens, tens of thousands of lines of front-end and back-end code, and a data store with more than 200 tables. But almost none of that complexity was documented. This lack of documentation made it harder to onboard new team members and maintain platform stability.
With new contractors and internal developers joining the company, there was no reliable way to learn a system critical to the agency's regulatory mission, and existing staff didn't have the bandwidth to onboard them one conversation at a time.
BAAQMD needed a trusted partner who could translate the complexity of PCS into clear, usable documentation without pulling internal staff away from their own work. They brought in Oshyn to document the system from the ground up.
The Solution
Oshyn was selected through BAAQMD's Preferred Vendor program, earning the top score among competing bids for its proposed approach and team experience.
To avoid disrupting BAAQMD's team, Oshyn's analysts worked largely independently, reading and scanning both the Angular front-end codebase and the back-end logic, mapping Azure-hosted services, tracing APIs, and cataloging data dependencies without relying on staff interviews for rationale or context.
Oshyn used code-scanning tools alongside AI language models to convert raw code and system logic into readable documentation at a pace that manual review alone couldn't match. Figma played a central role in the visual layer, with the team producing a full site map, page flow diagrams for key user tasks, and inventories of every UI control used throughout the system.
Every functional module of PCS was investigated and described to cover what exists, its structure, and how information flows through the system. Findings were organized into Word documents within a structured SharePoint directory, with HTML wrapper pages providing navigable entry points into the documentation.
200+
Documents Produced
The Outcome
Oshyn turned PCS’s inner workings into a structured, searchable library covering the full scope of a mission-critical system. It includes over 200 documents, hundreds of pages and images, and Figma diagrams that make PCS's architecture immediately understandable to someone seeing it for the first time.
New developers no longer depend on the availability of the few people who already understand PCS. They have a reliable foundation to work from, cutting the guesswork and risk that previously came with onboarding onto an undocumented platform. BAAQMD's ongoing maintenance engagement with Oshyn continues to build on that foundation.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA, and our Privacy Policy applies.