After a foreign vendor left the Russian market and ceased support, the company's critical production materials control system was left in limbo.
Since the system was essentially non-functional, this created serious risks for the company's material flow planning and management, while the lack of documentation blocked the ability to resolve ongoing incidents and further operation.
To resolve the situation, the ICL Services team was brought in, as the team had already worked with the customer on another project and was prepared to reverse engineer the system.
Key Challenges
- Survey the production system and prepare a survey report
- Restore and describe the system architecture and obtain the source code
- Configure the system build and deployment in the test environment
Implemented our solution
- The project began with a detailed survey: ICL Services specialists analyzed the current environment, examined the contents of the servers running the old system, and cloned it to local systems.
Next, a virtual, isolated test environment with copies of the systems was deployed, where the application was launched and its basic functionality was verified. Here, the team used reverse engineering to restore the source code, examine configuration files, and configure a connection to the Oracle DBMS.
Following this, the team analyzed the database structure, documented the architectural layers, and restored the operational logic: they built data schemas, reconstructed business processes using call chains, and identified algorithms, validation rules, caching, transactionality, and error handling.
The result of the work was a structured report including:
- general description of the architecture and technology stack (Java, Solaris, IBM MQ);
- restored data schemas;
- a list of risks, bugs, and areas for improvement;
- given recommendations for migration, optimization or code reuse.
Products and technologies
- Java
- Solaris
- IBM MQ
- Oracle
Results
- The project's source code and structure have been restored in a manageable form.
- The ability to build the project with changes to the source code and prepare a release has been restored.
- Complete documentation on the architecture, modules, and dependencies has been prepared, allowing the customer to provide further support and development of the system independently or with the help of contractors.
- Thanks to the survey, the customer can significantly accelerate production modernization in the future.