Non-Disruptive Reverse Engineering of a Legacy Donation Platform

Customer

The Customer is one of the largest religious broadcasting networks in the world.

Challenge

The Customer had a legacy software system consisting of an online donation platform and custom desktop accounting software. The Customer was dissatisfied with software maintenance and evolution being too costly and time-consuming. The reason for that was multiple code workarounds that have been growing for years and the absence of up-to-date software documentation.

So, the Customer was looking for a self-managed dedicated cross-disciplinary team of senior-level IT experts that could restore the info about the legacy system.

Solution

ScienceSoft’s cross-functional team of a project manager, a business analyst, .NET developers and architects was entrusted with the reverse engineering of the giving software.

Since the developers of the legacy system were not available, our business analyst and .NET experts conducted reverse engineering by interviewing knowledgeable non-IT employees from all the relevant departments, discussing all use and test cases with the Customer’s QA experts, performing lexical and syntactic analysis of the legacy code, and investigating legacy control and data flows.

The restored detailed information about the legacy system helped shorten the learning curve for a future support provider, identify potentially re-usable code parts and the code parts to be substituted, accurately plan the functionality of new custom modules, and plan safe replacement of the legacy code.

Results

ScienceSoft reverse engineered the legacy giving platform bringing no unplanned disruption to the donation process. The restored info about the legacy system helped to optimize the software maintenance and get the software ready for safe modernization.

Technologies and Tools

.NET 6, Azure DevOps, Angular.