Skip to main content

How Best Is To Revamp the Good Old Software?

Quick Quest - software created for college universities to generate ‘equally distributed complexity’ question papers. My college university attempted to utilize it and found it useful. This is an old story. The latest happening on this is, I am re-creating it with latest technology (.Net) putting the software architectural knowledge I have gained in several years being in this industry. If you are a person who is having more than 10 years of experience in software design, my step of software re-creation might not sound big for you. It turned out huge for me due to several reasons. When I had a plan to re-start on old successful software, I took opportunity to reach as many technical gurus as I can and asked them a most controversial question - “How good is to re-create good old software? Or should I extend the same old software with new features?”. Many had different thoughts but the common opinion was, extend the existing one instead going for whole new re-creation. When I sat and looked at the existing code base and also thought of the functionalities which I wanted to include newly, there was a strong sense of ‘more work and hard to manage code base’. For example, if I want to make some part of the application as configuration driven guided through configuration file (which could be an XML file) in good old Visual Basic 6.0, I have to manually write all the code to open file, navigate to the configuration entry, get the value and close the file. Newer programming language was offering it as one of its in-built feature. In fact, I gave you a simple example here.

I was keep receiving many views from many people on “application migration” act. Days were passing on. My thoughts were getting messier and started chaotic cooking in my mind. I had to finalize it. I created a small my own analysis report which gathers some points on Software business complexity, technology challenges, degree of ease to extended the current code base for future requirements, software support on production machine, deployment strategies, opportunities for web and mobile integration and utilization of forthcoming operating system features for future requirements. On the other side of the coin, nothing can be reused from previous software, spend more time creating all by greatly affecting schedules of my other products (Flexo, Outlet and CD Indexer), the technology which I am considering as ‘new’, may very soon get old when something ‘totally new’ hits.

Out of all these, strong points were making me incline towards the re-creation of the software using newer technology with very clear caution of uncertainties in this industry. I finally opted for re-creating it only if I am able to orchestrate the design of the software flexible enough to integrate, extend and reuse with current and future software technologies/products and hence the new version is under construction, “Quick Quest Compact Edition”. This edition of software works on single box, there will be “Professional” and “Web Edition” coming out in next several months targeting different audience. Now, what I have to see myself is how good I designed the internal architecture when something new really hits.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Akbar was Great?

I have fanatical interest to be acquainted with what made Indian emperors take influential decisions during their reign. Few great kings’ valuable decisions created a remarkable history. When Akbar accepts the marriage proposal of Hindu King (Bharmal of Amer), he wishes to make an attempt to set an example for two culture and religions and convey the message of peace. Later, destiny takes him to the critical path of life having most depraved political and family oriented problems. Being a true great emperor, Akbar learns and conclude challenges by demonstrating his exceptional leadership qualities. With his verdicts, Akbar stands as an incomparable king of all time. “Jodha Akbar” – brings 16th-century incidents to life and shows beginning part of Akbar’s married life which was, in fact, a deal for political gain. This decision slowly unleashes Akbar’s loving life, internal dreadful politics, painfully desirous people around him and betraying family members. Jalaluddin Mohamma...
8 comments
Read more

Linux - My Second Attempt

First time when I tried installing Linux on my box, I was failed to appraise it. I concluded that “I am typical ‘Windows’ user and might be not-understanding the Linux way”. I took break; I read some good articles on Linux. Few articles mentioned like “This Linux distribution is so easy that my grandma can use it…” I downloaded few Linux distributions (I would prefer not to mention their names here.) and tried installing one by one on my laptop. In almost all distributions, my first impression of Linux being faster operating system was gone. When I wanted to install new utility software (.rpm package) I had to learn command prompt options and finally ended up with error messages which tells one or the other supporting library is missing. Badly organized start menu always took more than required time to find out what I wanted. Too many small utilities fail to achieve user needs as a whole. Few distributions were good in few things. My overall intention was to get faster Linux on my ...
9 comments
Read more

How a university is saving 2.5 tons of paper every year?

Considering the current environmental imbalances, many non-profit organizations (like The Nature Conservity , SayTree …and many others) around the world working desperately to save plant  and trees. It is our responsibility too. We felt starting with universities is the better place to spread the awareness. With this, we also made universities administrative work more manageable and effective. The story I am going to share tells you how a university quietly worked and stands as a role model by saving tons of paper and millions of rupees of its own and its students. In the year 2012, VT University (Visvesvaraya Technological University also popularly known as “ VTU ”) Belgavi (India), has moved its thesis evaluations to online to effectively reduce its use of paper and streamline the process online. University’s this decision made it save several Lakhs of rupees (~ tens of thousands of dollars) every year in paper cost while giving faculty and administrators more direct a...
Post a Comment
Read more