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I'm working on a large program which has an abstracted GUI API. It is very GUI based, many dialogs and a few nasty features which rely heavily on the message flow of the GUI (correct sequences of focus/mouse/active handling etc.) - not easy to port
I now want to port it from the currently used FOX Toolkit to native Cocoa/MFC.
I give myself a timeframe until the end of the year but my main work will be to continue development work with the existing toolkit, but there is no planned release for end customers before both tasks are done.
My question is how should i spend my time?
Stop working on the main program and
do a 90% port (about 3 month) of the
GUI first
Splitting everything into smaller
sessions of one month each.
Assigning Monday/Tuesday to the GUI
project and the rest of the week for
the app.
Finishing the App first,
then port.
I think there are three arguments which i need to balance.
Motivation, i want to see something going on on both projects
Brain Input Overflow, both tasks require a lot of detail information
in my brain and sometimes enough is just enough.
I guess the porting is intervowen so porting would also require
a lot of code changes in the existing code and the new code that will
be written in the meantime.
I would finish the app first, then port it. IMO, the less projects you handle at the same time, the more effective you are.
If there is no planned release to the customers then you have the luxury of being able to structure the work exactly as you wish.
My first impression is that putting effort into finishing the app on the current platform, when you're going to throw that code away, is time at least partially wasted (you get some learning but the ultimate code is of no use).
Personally I'd park the existing version and start over with the Cocoa rewrite.
First up I'd divide it into functional chunks and view each one as an agile style release. These should be focused on end user tasks and functions and including both the GUI and back end work for these.
(The reason I don't like the idea of working through the GUI and app logic separately is that they're not separate. As part of a rewrite there may be opportunities to make improvements and this is harder if you're having to keep them compatible. A rewrite is an opportunity to make fundamental changes that doesn't often come along - I'd take it).
Work through the functional chunks one by one, getting it to a complete, releasable state before you move on to the next one. This will give you both the sense of achievement and the ability to measure progress. It also means that if an implementation looms out of nowhere you have complete usable chunks.
Also, by focusing on end to end tasks, hopefully the mind overflow stuff is minimised as you're always working within a single specific area rather than across the app.
It really depends on what you are comfortable with.
Personally, I would start porting now - a subsystem/piece at a time. You don't have to get the whole thing ported in one shot. You might find that the foundations of your application have to be rewritten to support being ported. If you wait until finishing the application to do the port, you may end up rewriting large portions of the app anyway. So I'd start by porting supporting libraries and core functionality, then slowly work to the edges.
In the meantime, each time you introduce a new class to the non-port make sure it is portable from the get go.
I started with one month each for MFC, Cocoa and GTK to do the basic stuff. And after this one week cycles among the systems to get the GUI abstraction layer. I haven't touched the application itself yet.
This was pretty efficient. Even when the complexity of MFC, Cocoa and GTK makes the typical monday morning when i do the switching even worse.
And i now know a lot how i have to change my application.
I will port the GUI toolkit before i continue adding features because as Jon mention i would otherwise have to write parts twice.
Related
What would you suggest would be a good challenge for a programmer to show us her/his skills? I'm thinking of a small demo implementation of a GUI program which would not take too much time to do.
Here are the circumstances: (this should not imply the intention to find programmers here, I think there'd be other forums to do that)
We are planning a project which has a tight time frame but apparently we are short on resources so we want to pull in external developers. The project is targetted to be Qt based (although this is not yet finally set) on the Windows platform. We'd prefer Qt as this allows to use own resources later when features need to be added to the software and we are familiar with the Qt platform.
The project needs to interface with HID USB hardware (writing some data blocks out, reading back the result, within to be guaranteed time frames) and a GUI showing graphs of the analyses.
The main intention however is not to find a Qt programmer (although we would prefer that) but a capable programmer - thus the important part of this question is about the challenge.
Don't ask programmers to write something from scratch as an interview task. It's far too suspect.
Think of the qualities that you want in a developer and then write an application that has all of those things done wrong, and ask them to fix it. For example, if you want an Object Oriented developer, give them an application with the data tables directly bound to the UI and ask them to make it OO - it means they can show you in a few minutes that they have OO skills.
By starting with a sample application that is "fixed up" with all the problems, it makes it really easy to compare the results and it will be a much faster test than if you ask people to write something from scratch.
Don't forget to make the test measurable. Score each thing you are testing as well as how long it takes.
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for my final year project (BSc Software Engineering) I am looking at time entries for software applications, and whether they accurately reflect the development of the project, and whether they can be improved or automated.
For this I will be prototyping a plug-in for Visual Studio using VSPackages that will automatically track which files are being worked on, assigning the files to tasks and projects. The plug-in will also track periods of inactivity within Visual Studio.
This will then be backed up via a simple Web Application for non-technical staff to pull reports from, so that projects can be tracked very accurately.
I currently work in a small company (10 people) and cannot get the large set of data I need to gain a good conclusion from. For this reason I ask if it would be possible to discuss the topic below and if you have a few spare minutes to fill in my questionnaire and email me the result to the address contained within the document:
http://www.mediafire.com/?dmrqmwknmty
Cheers,
MiG
In answer to your question, development time entries are important. But you can't measure them through a single IDE, nor indeed through any software. The development process is a complex one involving discussions, planning around a whiteboard, diagrams sketched on a piece of paper, research on the Internet, etc etc.
Read Jeff Atwood's excellent post on laziness and the other posts he refers to there. A good, successful developer spends time away from the IDE making sure they don't spend 90% of their working day reinventing the wheel, or 50% of their day heading down the wrong track because they haven't thought the design through.
I find the basic idea interesting, even though automated time tracking has flaws, just as measuring the number and frequency of commits to a project (as done on ohloh.net for example) can be a very misleading indicator about its activity.
However, the reality is that time worked is the basis for billing, and needs to be measured somehow. There are already solutions for this, though.
Take a look at
Grindstone or
AllNetic Working Time Tracker
(there are many more out there but these two I know well).
They work independently from what tool(s)/IDEs I am using, they can detect my absence/presence on the computer and prompt me about how I want to file the time, and they can do all the necessary reporting. It is also easy to add and manage filed entries.
What would your Visual Studio Plugin achieve that these solutions don't offer already?
Time spent developing in an IDE provides only a (sometimes very) partial metric of how much time a developer works.
I have been using FogBugz version 7 lately at work, and it has a feature that allows developers to estimate how long it will take them to finish a case. The developer can then use the software to say, "I am working on this case". Then the clock will count down until it reaches zero, based on the developer's working schedule (including days off), the hours that they say they are in the office, and the percentage of their time that they estimate they are working on cases.
But as a developer, I know that I can easily get sidetracked by more important cases. I also know that I spend a good deal of time working on the cases using tools other than the IDE - such as testing in MbUnit, looking for error message explanations online, or giving status to people who ask me why I have not finished working on a bug yet. And I've also been in places where I spent half the typical day - or more - in meetings or in a lab doing my work on a remote machine somewhere else. When I'm at my desk, I could be using my computer to map out ideas for the work I'm doing, or just pen and paper.
So there are a lot of variables to consider when you ask the question, "Is the guy who sits over there really doing his work?" You would really need to look at more running applications than just Visual Studio 2008 (devenv.exe). You would probably need to look at activity for processes associated with a developer's test framework, text documents, remote desktop connections to other machines, and even Firefox. (Firefox would be a huge judgment call as to whether somebody is actually working!)
As part of your research for the project, I would also suggest researching some of the other time collection systems that are in use throughout your company's industry and comparing their features.
A bit off track, but you could potentially use this sort of data to illuminate areas of complexity (LOC), areas that are prone to change (frequent updates 'n' days apart), etc. but even this would be skewed by different programmers approaches to development.
We track all our time by project daily. It takes me less than five minutes a day to fill out what I was working on. This is not something that can be automated or even should be automated as it will never be anywhere close to accurate. Files aren't always associated with just one project and it would cost me more time to tell an application which files belong to which project that the five minutes it takes to fill our my timesheet. No one spends the entire day typing - there are meetings and phone calls and thinking (you know where you figure out what you want to type!), none of that will be captured in your automated system. What you are porposing will not be more accurate, it will be less accurate than requiring people fill in time sheets daily.
While time entries are important, figuring out how to organize it is where trouble comes into the picture. How well would non-technical staff understand the various phases of development in order to understand the data? I'll agree with the other responses that the IDE tracking is a terrible idea, especially if part of what is being done involves changing a database through a web browser which is what I have in my current big CMS project where we may have to change templates or create content to test out if the functionality works.
This also heavily ignores the gaming the system idea that can happen. What if I leave my IDE open in debug because I'm wanting to scan memory or do something else that requires the window be open to actually look at something but I could also have left my desk unless you are somehow tracking where I'm looking and sitting.
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Hey all. I would like to get some insight on a question that I have been trying to find some information about. If you are the solo developer that is building a project from ground up, how do you manage the project? In the past, I have worked on a few personal projects that have grown into fairly large projects. In almost all of those projects, I have tried to wear the hats of all the roles that would normally be in place during a normal software development project (i.e. Product Owner, developer, architect, tester, etc.). It seems that when I leave the project for some time and come back, it is extremely hard to get back into the rhythm of what I was doing. So with that, I have some questions:
If I know the requirements (at this
current time), do I record them
anyways? If so, how do I go about
doing this, and how do I manage these
requirements? Product backlog,
features list, etc?
If this is the case, are full blown product backlogs or use cases a little overkill?
How does one efficiently appropriate
his/her time to each respective role?
What would be a normal flow of events
that one would follow? Start coding
immediately, write down user
stories/use cases, then go into
OOA/D?
What diagramming/modeling would be sufficient for this level? Domain model, class diagram, etc?
Basically, I was curious how everyone out there in the SO community would go about developing a project from inception to deployment when you are the lone, solo developer. What steps, documentation, and other project related activities are needed to help bring this project from an impractical, hobby project to something more professional? Any help, references, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
The most difficult part, I have found, about developing solo is that it's just tough to keep yourself driving forward. Even if you're doing this to make a living (AKA, running your own software business), unless you have pressing needs (AKA, you're going to starve if you don't make money) it can be difficult to sit down and just code.
From your perspective, I would recommend following good software practices where it makes sense to. For example, if I were a solo software developer, I would have no reason to create a collaborative development environment. All I really need is an SVN server, my IDE, and a place to record documentation (might setup a wiki or a website or something). I would personally create a realistic schedule to follow and would work on sticking to that.
As for level of effort of documentation, that really depends on you and the product you are developing. For example, I would definitely recommend recording your requirements. Unless your product is trivial, there is no way you'll remember them all and why you wanted certain ones over others. Managing a full backlog, however, can be a job in and of itself. In the solo programmer case this may not make sense.
Basically, the point I'm trying to get across (and should be followed with every project - not just in this case) is have just enough management that makes sense. The rest should be focused on the work and the development of the product.
Something else you may want to look into is reading this - Agile Programming Works for the Solo Developer. There are other, similar, articles out there. Might give you some good thoughts.
If I know the requirements (at this
current time), do I record them
anyways? If so, how do I go about
doing this, and how do I manage these
requirements? Product backlog,
features list, etc?
I have two lists of features:
A high-level view which states the scope of the finished product
A list of the features which I'm implementing in this iteration
Because I don't need to communicate it to other people (yet) I tend to write down the things that I don't know about the project (if I already know it there's no need to write it down): it's when it gets too complicated, or when there are details which I haven't defined but need to define, that I start to define them in writing.
I did however try to investigate/make a business-case for the project before starting coding.
How does one efficiently appropriate
his/her time to each respective role?
I did non-programmer, product-owner thinking at times when I had to be away from the computer anyway.
Apart from that, my cycle is:
Implement more functionality
Integration-test it
[repeat as above]
Every 3 to 6 months I compare the new-functionality-accomplished against my estimated schedule, and then recalibrate: i.e., make a new list of the highest-priority features to implement in the next few months.
What would be a normal flow of events
that one would follow? Start coding
immediately, write down user
stories/use cases, then go into OOA/D?
I started with working part-time or in my spare time, to make sure that I had:
Understood the required functionality
Made significant architectural decisions
Written any throw-away prototypes as necessary to learn new technology
After that I was ready to start developing full-time.
What diagramming/modeling would be sufficient for this level? Domain model, class diagram, etc?
I'm not using diagrams at all (except for sketches of the UI). By structuring the code, and refactoring, I'm able to know/remember/rediscover/decide which software components implement what functionality.
It seems that when I leave the project
for some time and come back, it is
extremely hard to get back into the
rhythm of what I was doing.
You need to comment your code more. If you leave the code, come back in two weeks, and can't remember how the code works, you need more comments.
If I know the requirements (at this
current time), do I record them
anyways?
Yes, for the same reasons stated above.
how do I manage these requirements?
A feature list is OK, provided you have enough detail in each feature to jog your memory.
How does one efficiently appropriate
his/her time to each respective role?
Break down each feature into smaller and smaller tasks, until you feel like you can do each task in a half day or less.
What would be a normal flow of events
that one would follow?
That depends on your development style. In general I would follow a clear but simple architecture, avail yourself of software patterns where practical, and provide adequate unit tests for your code as you go.
What diagramming/modeling would be
sufficient for this level?
Sufficient diagramming/modeling to make the project clear in your head.
What steps, documentation, and other
project related activities are needed
to help bring this project from an
impractical, hobby project to
something more professional?
Other than what I have already mentioned, make sure you have a good source control system and daily backups in place.
Good luck!
If you believe there is a chance that you're going to work on the project for some amount of time, leave it, and then come back to it at a later date...your best bet is to treat the documentation for the project the same as if you were working with a large team.
That means documenting requirements (even if they're from yourself), writing use cases (if functionality is going to be complex, otherwise some other form of documentation could suffice), and some level of UML diagraming (or other domain specific diagram) which could include activity diagrams/class diagrams/etc.
That way, when you leave the project for some amount of time, you can come back to a well documented idea and pick up where you left off.
As a side note, I try to do the majority of those things no matter what...that way if I ever find somebody interested in working on the project with me, I can get them up to speed quickly and get them on board with my ideas.
This is how I work, YMMV:
Keep a spreadsheet for high level of everything - list of your projects, and some top-level items/todos/reminders
Create a "project" folder for each product/project you have or work on, and create a strucuture to contain documentation and code for the project.
Keep a top-level "catch-all" document for each project, in the root of this folder. Keep you ideas, research, notes etc in this doc.
Then if you want to get organized, keep an MS project file (or similar) and plot out timelines for the various steps in each project. This is good for tracking progress on each project and make sure you arent forgetting anything. Basically keeps you honest with yourself.
And if you need to track progress on project work you are doing for clients, I understand Basecamp is a good solution for this. I am currently evaluating it for my own company. See www.basecamphq.com
Even as a solo developer, you should document at least the overall features of your project, and then the requirements for the particular feature you are working to complete, and then maybe produce a short pseudo-code for the functionality you're currently working on.
That way, if you do end up breaking away from that project, you can get back to it and see where you're up to easily enough. It's also pointless getting too far ahead of yourself with details for this same reason.
It's also a neat motivational tool for a solo developer - getting through and ticking things off is a way to show progress - something that you can start to feel you're not making when you're chewing through a couple of thousand lines of code and it seems like you're still miles away from actually having 'module x' completed.
Lastly - with regards to code comments - I at least try and fill out what actions/behaviour a new function should have in an outline, and then write the code in between the comments. Also, it is useful having plain English explanations of why you're branching in an if/else to support the logic in the condition...
I belive that better results in solo development one can achive with appropriate tools support and tasks that compensate lack of ohers people and help to organize working time. Any tool that generate metada with minimal create time cost describing your software is helpful.
VCS and tools for tracking user actity/code changes history - very important is to add good commit messages
mind-mapping tools for storing project related data (e.g. XMind), blacboard is useful too :)
time tracking tools (e.g. Toggl.com)
write a lot of acceptance test and use acceptance testing frameworks
Of course these clues also fits in non solo development :)
As a lone developer, I've found that your time is very expensive. This means that you have to balance sustainability and momentum - even though you are just one guy, you have to do things so that the you six months from now can go back and look at old stuff without wasting time, without spending so much time maintaining the systems that it compromises your flow.
Your question suggests that you are thinking in terms of fairly heavyweight tools and processes, but the 80/20 rule applies - for example, you can nail documentation well enough by TDD, using the doc tools of your platform to generate API docs, plus a Wiki for specs, lists, etc.
In that vein, I would suggest that you choose your platform carefully. The question about modelling suggests that you are using a platform that produce a lot of code and artifacts, but you may be able to get most of the functionality for much less management overhead elsewhere. Today I'm working on a .NET Web app that I wrote "the right way", but now realize that I could have delivered the same functionality much more efficiently in this case by using PHP with a PHP MVC framework to keep a clean structure.
Specific tools that I'd recommend:
A distributed version control system (much less overhead than centralized)
The most lightweight platform that you can use that has good tooling
A Wiki to easily capture and maintain small and large bits of content
Whatever testing framework that you can use, right from the start of the project
A lightweight TODO list system that you can access from anywhere
I used to work on a very small team (one dba and one C# developer). Even then I found it very useful to have written requirements, formal tests, source control and bug tracking (we used bug tracking for our features as well as bugs). It helped us to not forget anything and a year later when you were doing maintenance, you had something to research though to help you undersatnd what you did. Plus when the two of us left (as most people eventually move on) there was documentation there for the next person.
What conversion/rewrite have you been involved with that failed? What where the languages and framework involved in the process? How large was the software in question? Finally what is the top one or two thing you learned from being involved with the process.
This is related to this question.
One of my favorites was a fixed price project developing a server app on Sun OS 3 that was eventually required to run on an old Data General machine running some (at the time) current version of Unix.
Now, we knew ahead of time it would be painful porting the C code to the Data General because it had 9 bit bytes / 36 bit words but didn't realize how ... lacking... the Unix implementation would be.
It was approximately 5 hours from the start of the porting task when the wise executive decision was made to simply buy the customer a shiny new Sun box.
I had one recently that largely failed due to my inability to thoroughly convince management that rewriting the app would be cheaper in the long run than to keep maintaining it as it was. If I had only read up on technical debt sooner, it may have been a success. Jeff's latest article on the topic was about 8 months too late for me!
All told the app was about 75K lines of C# code but it was a maintenance nightmare (in-house application). A handful of god classes and the rest were what I called puppet classes (classes by name only, the god classes "pulled the strings" for everything they did). Almost nothing was user-configurable so developers were responsible for everything.
In hindsight, the biggest roadblock to success was the app itself. Keeping it running was a full-time job for 3 of us. I think the best thing we could have done was to keep on refactoring. The "version 2" app had some real good concepts and we should have kept on trying to get them integrated instead of starting over... Had we done that, we could have built the big components after stabilizing the original app.
I once attempted to port a game I wrote in DarkBasic to C.
The problem I ran into was that DarkBasic was such a limited language (for example, no argument passing by reference) when I ported it I attempted to do a straight port... IE, I tried not to refactor it appropriately for the language I was using...
The result was a big mess...
I probably could have gotten it working, but I stopped after about 2 days because I realized it needed more than just translation to move to C...
I had written a Pacman clone using C and Allegro back in the day and I tried to rewrite it to run on the Dreamcast.
That was some horrible code. I couldn't really salvage much from the code base and scrapped the idea.
I learned that regardless of what I thought at the time, I was a really horrible programmer back then and I had learned a lot in the passing years. It also made me realize that in a few years time, I should learn enough to look back on the code I was writing today and think the same thing. Basically, I should always strive to become better.
I was once asked to convert a program which drove a photo typsetter on a DEC-System10 to IBM 4381. Looking at the code, I discovered that the original developer had, for no obvious reason, written various bits of the program in the following different languages:
DEC FORTRAN
Algol 68
BCPL
MACRO-10
This was a great testimony to DEC's support for multi-language programming, but it was the only time I've had to go to a user and say "No can do".
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What successful conversion/rewrite have you done of software you were involved with? What where the languages and framework involved in the process? How large was the software in question? Finally what is the top one or two thing you learned from being involved with the process.
This is related to this question
I'm going for "most abstruse" here:
Ported an 8080 simulator written in
FORTRAN 77 from a DECSystem-10 running TOPS-10 to an
IBM 4381 mainframe running VM/CMS.
I rewrote 20,000 lines of Perl to use "use strict" in every file. I had to add "my" everywhere it was needed and I had to fix the bugs that were uncovered during the process.
The biggest thing I learned from doing this is, "It always takes longer than you think."
I had to get it done all at once overnight so that the other coders would not be writing new, unfixed code at the same time. I thought it would go quickly, but it didn't, and I was still hacking on it at 6 AM the next morning.
I did get it complete and checked in before everyone else started work though!
I rewrote a large java web application to an ASP.Net application for a realty company for various reasons.
The biggest thing I learned is that, no matter how trivial the feature the original system had, if it's not in the second system, the client thinks the rewrite is a failure. Expectation management is everything when writing the new system.
This is the biggest reason rewrites are so hard: it seems so easy to the client ("Just re-do what I already have and add a few things.").
The coolest one for me, I think, was the port of MAME to the iPod. It was a great learning experience with embedded hardware, and I got to work with a lot of great people. Official site.
I am doing a rewrite of an Inhouse Project managment system to a more standard MVC model. Its in the LAMP stack (PHP) and i am close to the 1st milestone.
The things i have learned from that currently is how simple the program feels at the beginning and i tried to not add complexity until i have to.
Example is that i programmed all the functionality first (like i was an admin user) and then when that is sorted out, add the complexity of having restrictions (user levels etc)
I ported/redesigned/rewrote a 30,000-line MS-DOS C++ program into a similar-length but much more fully-featured and usable Java Swing program.
I learned never to take another job involving C++ or Java.
I ported a client server Powerbuilder app, a couple of hundred screens worth, into an ASP.NET app (C#).
Due to performance and maintainability issues, I had over the previous year moved a ton of embedded SQL out of Powerbuilder scripts and into stored procedures.
Although this would make a lot of you wince, having a lot of business logic in the database, it mean the Powerbuilder app was relatively "light" and when we built the .Net front end, it could take advantage of the SQL codebase and have a lot of functionality already built and tested.
Not saying I'd recommend building apps that way, but it certainly worked to our advantage in this instance.
We had a code generation tool in our application framework that was used to read in text-based data files, About 20 other applications made use of it.
We wanted to make use of XML data files instead of structured text-based files. The original code was quite outdated and difficult to maintain. We replaced this tool by a combination of XSLT scripts and a utility library. For the utility library we could make use of some code in the old tool.
The result was that all 20 applications could now make use of either the obsolete text based file format or the new XML based format. We also delivered a conversion-generation tool that converted old data files to new XML data files.
After bringing out one or two release we have now decided that we will no longer support the old text based format and everybody is able to convert their data to XML.
We did hardly have to do manual conversions,
Converted the main company app from pre-standard C++ to standard C++. We had a multimillion dollar sale contingent on making it work on AIX, and after looking at it we decided that converting to standard C++ was going to be just as easy as converting to IBM's traditional C++.
I don't know the line count, but the source code ran to hundreds of megabytes.
We used standard Unix tools to do this, including vi and the assorted compilers.
It took a few months. Most of the fixes were simple ones, caught by the compiler and almost mechanically fixed. Some of them were much more complicated.
I think my main takeaway was: Don't get too awfully clever with code in a language that hasn't been standardized yet, or is likely to have things change in unexpected ways. We had to do a lot of digging in some of the ingenious adaptations/abuses of C++ streams.
Ten years ago I managed a team that converted a CAD system from DOS into Windows. The DOS version used home-brew libraries for graphics drawing, the Windows version used MFC. The software was about 70.000 lines of C code at the time of the conversion. The most important thing we learned in the process is the power of abstraction. All device-specific non-portable routines were isolated in a few files. It was therefore relatively easy to substitute the calls to the DOS-based library that would draw by directly accessing the frame buffer with Windows API calls. Similarly, for input we just substituted the event loop that checked for keyboard and mouse events, with the corresponding Windows event loop. We continued our policy of isolating the non-portable (this time Windows) code from the rest of the system, but we have not yet found this particularly useful. Perhaps one day we will port the system to Mac OS X and be thankful again.
Several. But I mention one.
It was a performance modeling tool. Part delphi 1, part turbo pascal. It needed a rewrite else it was not going to survive. So we started as a team of 2, but only me survived to the end. And I was ready before the deadline ;-).
Several things we did:
Make it multimodel. The original had lots of globals. I removed them all and multi model was easy to adapt.
Extended error messages. Click on a message and get the help.
Lots of graphs and diagrams. All clickable to drill down.
Simulation. Change parameters over time and see how long the current configuration was enough.
We really made this one clean and it paid back heavily in the end. Such a big learning experience.
Re-wrote a system for a company that processes legal invoices - the original system was a VB monstrosity that had no idea of good OO principles - everything was mixed together. The HTML did SQL, and the SQL wrote HTML. A large part of it was a custom rules engine that used something like XML for the rules.
Two teams did the re-write, which took about 9 months. One team did the web front end and the backend workflow, while the other team (that I was on) re-wrote the rules engine. The new system was written in C#, and was done test-first. Adding new rules to the system when we were done was dirt simple, and it was all testable. Along the way we did things like convert the company from VSS to SVN, implement continuous integration, automate the deployment, and teach the other developers how to do TDD and other Scrum/XP practices.
Managing expectations was crucial through the project. Having a customer that was savvy about software was very helpful.
Having a mix of large scale (end-to-end) tests along with comprehensive unit and integration tests helped tons.
Converted vBulletin which is written in PHP into C#/Asp.NET. I'm pretty familiar with both languages, but PHP is the hands down the winner for building that software. The biggest pain in the rear was needing to do a C# equivalent of PHP's eval() for calling the templates.
It was my first challenge in trying to do a conversion. I learned that I need more experience with C# and that writing it from scratch is just the easier route sometimes.
I converted a dynamical build-process completely written in Perl to a C#/.Net solution using a workflow-engine a co-worker had developed (which was still in beta - so I had to do some refinements). That gave me the oppertunity to add fail-safe and fail-over functionality to the build process.
Before you ask - no - the microsoft workflow-foundation could not be used since you cannot dynamically change a process during its runtime.
What I learned:
to hate the Perl-developer
process-optimization using a wf-engine
fail-safe and fail-over strategies
some C# tweaks ;)
In the end it covered about 5k - 6k (including the wf-engine) LoC origin from 3 200 LoC Perl-files. But it was fun - and far better in the end ;)
Converting theoretically portable C code into theoretically portable C code across architectures to support a hardware change that saves the company X dollars per unit.
The size varies - this is a common need, and I've done small and large projects.
I learned to write more portable C code. Elegance is great, but when it comes right down to it the compiler takes care of performance, and the code should be as simple and portable as possible.
Ported a simulation written in Fortran 77 (despite being written in the 90s) to C/Java because the original only worked on small data sets. I learned to love big O notation after several times of explaining why just moving the entire data table into memory at the start of the program was not going to scale.
Migrating the B-2 Stealth Bomber mission software from JOVIAL to C. 100% fully automated conversion. Seriously!
Main lesson: using configurable automated conversion tools is a huge win.
See DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit.