The Client

The client is a manufacturer and distributor of precision measuring instruments. It is headquartered in Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan. The company was established in 1934.

Requirements

The existing system of the client was based on Oracle 8.0.5. However, due to the licensing issue, they wanted to upgrade to Oracle 9.2.0.4 which meant the whole sale applications (258 modules) written in VB 5.0 had to be converted to VB .NET

Duration: 12 months

Challenges

Converting a huge number of modules in VB 5.0 to VB .NET can cause many unpredictable issues, therefore the solution had to be insightful - there was a need to ensure that enough flexibility was built-in to the new system to accommodate changing business and regulatory requirements.

Despite being well equipped with all the necessary domain and technology skills, our team had to work closely with the client to understand all the necessary aspects of the complex sale system.

This was the first time our client had worked with an offshore technology partner. Thus program management became crucial, not only to meet deliverables and deadlines, but also to reassure the client on its maiden offshore exercise.

Solutions

We worked closely with our client on this project. A 67 member team took ownership of the complete end-to-end solution - from requirement definition to testing, and then to the final implementation.

The team developed a standard Conversion Process and Conversion tool to compare between VB 5.0 code and VB .NET source code, and thus prevent any undesirable issues.

We used its domain specialists extensively to understand the client's needs and the System Specification. The project was completed in 8 months, during that time the team rewrote the entire  sale system including 258 modules in VB 5.0 to VB .NET.

After accomplishing the conversion phase, the team implemented unit testing in order to eliminate uncertainty in the modules themselves. NUnit, an open source unit testing framework for Microsoft .NET was applied. The process made the integration testing much easier.

Our team also supported the client in deploying the system in Tokyo.

Technologies Used: Oracle 8.0.5, Oracle 9.2.0.4, Visual 6, Visual Studio .NET version 2003, Visual Source Safe 6.0, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Nunit.

Benefits to Customer

The most important thing from the vendor point of view was that the costs were cut dramatically,

Major bugs in the system were removed to migrate seamlessly with Oracle database.