VAGen/Smalltalk Desktop GUI to Web-based EGL RUI plus Continuous Modernization to Enable Global Expansion

1. The Company

This joint venture company offers European organizations administrative, backstage, and licensing services. Its mission is to offer international copyright services that are transparent, reliable, and cost-efficient to enable customers to maximize distributions to their members. Their headquarters are in Copenhagen with offices in London.

2. The Background      

Expansion into new geographies and increasing demands of digital transformations put pressure on its mission-critical software to evolve aggressively. Although the company is committed to keeping up with modern technology, the needs of the business to deliver new functionality naturally took priority over modernization. This resulted in some legacy programming languages, frameworks, and architecture lingering, increasing technical debt and creating a drag on evolving the software.

3. The Modernization Strategy

The company took a proactive approach to modernization, making it a strategic part of its product development roadmap. The team embraced DevOps principles for greenfield development and sought a solution to approach modernization in a similar agile and iterative process. From a technology standpoint, the team needed to migrate the VAGen/Smalltalk desktop GUI to a web-based EGL RUI. 

In addition to migrating from the VAGen programming language, it wanted to advance the underlying application architecture and reinforce its DevOps development practices. They wanted a vendor with deep knowledge, experience, methodology, and technology in legacy application modernization with whom they could partner to incrementally modernize the application without freezing its ongoing development while following DevOps best practices.

4. The Solution

“Normally, I would worry about the time frames and accessibility when working with partners in various time zones. However, this is not the case with the team at Synchrony. They are always available and easy to work with, and we trust them as an extension of our team.”

When IBM ended support for VAGen GUIs, they recommended that the company speak with Synchrony Systems to assist with the migration. IBM worked with Synchrony on several other successful migrations and experienced their advanced migration technology and deep expertise in Smalltalk, VAGen, EGL, and GUI frameworks.

Throughout the evaluation period, the team was continuously impressed with Synchrony’s automation technology, iterative and agile approach, and holistic view of modernization offered by their Modernization Lifecycle Platform (MLP) – from migration to regression testing to production release. As a result, it chose Synchrony as its trusted partner for its continued application modernization journey.

Modernization focused on migrating VAGen/Smalltalk GUI desktop technology to EGL RUI web technology. The Synchrony team drove the modernization process while the company’s engineers focused on testing and documentation. MLP was used to manage the planning, execution, tracking, testing, monitoring, and quality assurance of the project. 

The company continued the application development while the front-end migration ran in parallel. Using the automation technology and migration libraries within MLP, any new code released to production was merged into the modernization track for migration. The company could also automatically apply test cases and regression testing to the migrated code base. 

5. The Results

“It was amazing – I didn’t think anyone on Earth could modernize our system, and Synchrony did it with ZERO migration-related errors on the new system.” 

Using Synchrony’s MLP solution, 433 VAGen GUI screens were fully migrated to EGL RUI. The company ran 378 test cases over eight weeks to ensure production parity between the legacy application and the new, migrated front-end. The total modernization from start to production took eighteen months. MLP was instrumental in tracking defects, executing test cases, and producing metrics to ensure proper testing resources were allocated while maintaining defect resolution and verification velocity.

As with every software provider, IBM updates EGL RUI to support modern browser and OS technology. Due to the success of the major migration initiative, the company asked Synchrony to use MLP, their ModOps processes, workflows, and automation technologies to upgrade EGL RUI to the latest version. 

Using MLP to upgrade the EGL RUI, the time to production-ready code was cut in half. The total project time was reduced to nine months. The test period, which consisted of the same 433 screens with 378 test cases, was reduced to four weeks. Along with the overall better performance of the application’s front-end, the codebase was decreased by 30%. Not only did the company achieve browser and OS compatibility with increased performance, but it also reduced its application footprint. 

The latest modernized code was released to production with zero migration-related errors on the new system and zero operational disruptions to the business. 

The company didn’t want just a migration vendor but a partner that could bring modern, agile methodologies to help them improve the build and deploy systems and who could be an extension of their internal IT team. The holistic view Synchrony takes on the entire modernization process, from migration to production, was a critical factor in the success of this project. Moreover, Synchrony helped ensure the in-house team had the knowledge and competencies to maintain and reinforce the modernized software with their DevOps practices.