Case Study: Consulting service for an Australian casting agency
Background story
The client is Australia and New Zealand's leading and most seasoned casting service. Established in 1960 they have been
connecting actors and agents to casting professionals for 47 years. The client started as a printed directory of actors and actresses,
and now every major agent in Australia and New Zealand has their actors appear in the book and Internet versions of the client's
list volumes.
Though the business is steadily growing, the client has a big headache. When the client begun operating on the Internet about 7 years ago,
they have had a local software company do programming and 4 years ago outsourced ongoing programming to a Russian team. Since then,
features were continuously added on the obsolete system, thus now the system is very tightly coupled and spagettied together.
The client knew very clearly that the system needed a change.
But how?
It was very important that their regular service being not interrupted when the system was operated, thus the client chose a middle course,
which was to pick up one unit, re-factor it and then integrate into the current system. This process will be repeated until the whole system
had been replaced. The client thought this path was viable because the work scope would be broken down into manageable pieces,
and the budget is more controllable.
However, our technical consultants gave a different solution after going over the website and its historical code. What they found was,
if the re-factored unit was integrated into the existing system with poor maintainability, we would need to patch up the old code, or make
the new unit compatible with the previous old code. Based on our previous experience, it was quite difficult to patch up an old system
for the sake of a stable version. What's worse, it might be time-consuming because we would need to spend a lot of time working on the
compatibility with the existing system. Taking all these facts into consideration, we suggested the client re-wring the whole website
from scratch and after several rounds of communication, the client was finally convinced this is a better solution.
The next step
Firstly the client provided us with a functionality plan which briefly explained the functions required in the new system,
how the functions interact with each other. The purpose of this document is to provide us with information about how to design the framework.
After receiving the plan, we submitted the framework design of the new system to the client so that they could understand the code
structure of the new system. When we arrive at an agreement on the framework, we started working on the first module; in the meantime
the client was preparing the requirements for the next module. We kept doing so until all the modules are successfully accomplished.
Subsequently there came all kinds of testing work for the new system. After successful test the new system was launched to
replace the existing system.
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