Projects

Underperforming System Gets New Life::

Problem

A large firm needed to bring stability to an underperforming information management system. Although written by project teams from a top tier IT consulting firm, the original application performed inconsistently and required repeated short-term contracts for developers to "fix" functionality that had become unstable. While users liked the appearance and functionality offered by the application, the system's owners were growing frustrated with the high cost of maintaining it. The company asked for advice on eliminating these problems and improving the system's stability.

Solution

The team audited the existing system, which had been designed as a 3-tier application running Oracle and Java (servlets and JSP). It aggregated information from hundreds of external and internal sources into a single repository, and included advance search and browse functionality. The audit found that although the architecture was sound, suboptimum implementation quality and sometimes ineffectual repair engagements had created numerous coding problems throughout the application. As a result the application was now fraught with what could be described simply as "bad code" that was the most likely cause of the "quirky" performance. Rather than attempt to patch each error and inconsistency, the team recommended a re-write of the core program to instill missing quality and consistency.

Although initial system development had taken nearly a year to program, the team was able to re-write the application from scratch -- always maintaining and often improving its functionality and features -- in two months.

Result

The system was stabilized and refitted with easy-to-use maintenance protocols that significantly reduced ongoing de-bugging requirements and their associated costs. The project also returned the system to compliance with ongoing corporate technology standardization.

Other Projects

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• From Custom to Off-the-Shelf