Application Redevelopment and Maintenance
Suppliers of IT services are often unable to ensure application support during the whole application lifecycle, which can be relatively long (3-15 years, according to the industry). This problem does not arise only as a result of the supplier’s cessation. It arises also because of the frequent and significant changes of business requirements, with the termination of support of older technologies and with the movement of employees between IT service suppliers. An application takeover can guarantee the continued support and development of the application throughout its lifecycle.
Application takeover is not simply a technical matter. If the application shall not only be operated, but further developed as well, it is necessary to fully understand the customer’s business processes. Therefore, embedding the application into the organizational and personal framework is important.
Ordinarily we conduct the takeover in two phases. The preliminary analysis is necessary in order to harmonize the application’s functionality, documentation and current processes, architecture, technologies and the links to surrounding systems and it is finalized with the technical takeover. During the pilot project, the system of maintenance and support is agreed according to an arranged service level agreement (SLA). This defines the rules for setting up the application into a productive environment and implementing the measured parameters and a monitoring system. Afterwards the application support moves to a routine operation, the application is further supported and developed.
Reversed Engineering
If the application’s source code is not available, then we conduct reverse engineering. A reverse compilation of the code is possible only under specific conditions. It is always possible to conduct a basic application analysis, state its distribution into components, detect its connections to other systems, extract its database model (both the logical and physical one), create an abstract application model or to update the documentation.
