Our Strong offshore methodology helps in the successful conversion of a billing system from Informix ESQL/C to Oracle PL/SQL.

The Client: US based second largest credit bureau
Business Model: Offshore fixed price

The Challenge

This is a rewrite of an existing legacy application written in 'C' and Informix ESQL/C. The Client processes different kind of home mortgage reports for online as-well-as batch customers. This system was an integration of two disparate systems connected with an interface. These two systems were inherited from the merger of two organizations. The user interface was migrated from an Informix 4GL to Java based 'n' tier architecture with Oracle 9i as the backend database. This re-engineering necessitated a new database model.

The billings re-write involved:

• Unifying two processes
• Developing code in ASP. VBScript and Java Script using IIS
• Converting Informix ESQL/C and C code to Oracle PL/SQL
• Java class files for File write/EBCIDIC conversion
• Developing code to generate EBCIDIC file for interfacing with a legacy application

The Solution

After the initial system study, the entire project was executed at our offshore development center.

All potential risk items were identified during the system study phase. For instance, it was found that the documentation on the business logic of the system was inadequate. This would lead to inadequate test plans and cases, which would in turn lead to insufficient regression testing. Similarly the billing application interfaced with a legacy system using an EBCIDIC file. The users were not aware of the character set utilized in the application. The exact production environment was not feasible to be re-produced at the offshore center. The business rules were extracted and documented after studying the existing 'C' and ESQL/C code. The additional requirements specified by the customers were also documented. The test cases were prepared and approved by the Client team. The test data was downloaded from the Client on our FTP site and used for unit and system testing of the application.

There was no schedule overruns. Our team met the deadline of every milestone on time.