Clients

The Client:

Even clients who depend on IT to run their businesses often retain only the IT staff required to manage and maintain their operation. Many companies just don’t have full in-house IT departments to tackle IT projects that go beyond daily management. In these situations, Trellist can help. We recently completed work on a vital internal application for a national communication giant. This company selected Trellist for its IT & Application Development expertise.

Business Objective:

The Fortune 100 client needed to migrate existing applications written in PowerBuilder (a 90’s technology client / server application development platform) and rewrite them in .Net. The client has core competencies in .Net but few PowerBuilder resources and no one who knew both platforms. The current workload prohibited the internal staff from taking on this important conversion project and there was no one with the combined experience to efficiently run the project.

Trellist Approach and Execution:

The client considered several approaches and in the end selected Trellist. Our approach featured an on-shore development team, led by a team of developers with experience in both PowerBuilder and .Net who would work with the client’s staff both at Trelllist’s office and at the client’s site. The Trellist team featured talent from our staff for business analysis, information architecture, software architecture, development and programming. We also used our Resource Management Division to round out the project team for one key role.

We recommended and completed an analysis of the legacy application resulting in detailed business requirements and technical documentation containing use cases and a variety of UML diagrams. This document was then used as the foundation for the new application’s technical architecture.

Trellist architects worked closely with the client’s IT staff to ensure that the application architecture met the client’s development standards. A three-layer approach was adopted:

• Presentation Layer: This user-facing layer contains all the graphic and display elements. Telerik RadControls were used to facilitate and standardize the GUI (Graphical User Interface). The client already had experience with RadControls.
• Business Layer: This is where all of the business logic, data validation and manipulation of data take place.
• Data Layer: This is where all communication with the database occurs. We used LINQ to SQL for new queries and to replicate the SQL that was previously inline in the legacy code. The existing SQL Server database including stored procedures was left largely intact; however, some changes were applied to improve efficiency.

The development methodology was a typical waterfall approach, but in-person weekly touchpoints demonstrated progress with specific functional deliverables along the way. Trellist performed most of the development work from the Trellist home office, but at key times during the project, to facilitate communication, members of the development team worked on-site at the client’s facility.

During the quality assurance phase, Trellist created HP LoadRunner test scripts to verify functionality and facilitate regression testing throughout the project lifecycle. Trellist also created, executed and analyzed LoadRunner scripts to do load and performance testing by developing scenarios, scripting, parameterization, executing tests and analyzing results to ensure that the new application met agreed-upon levels of performance benchmarked against the legacy system.

The project was completed on time and without budget overruns.

For more information about this client story, contact us. In most cases, we work with our clients on a confidential basis. However, with our client’s approval, we can discuss basic parameters of this project with our business partners.

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