3 Strong Reasons You Need a Software Application Rewrite

The Farber Consulting Group Inc., will be happy to help you update legacy systems that are slowing your business down. Besides being database experts who offer remote DBA services, we are also experienced in custom software development. With some of our consultants boasting more than 30 years in the industry, the Farber Consulting Group Inc. is a name you can trust, and we pride ourselves on always keeping up with the times. With that in mind, here are three reasons that it is time for you to make use of our custom software development services.

The 3 points below were sent as an email to a client after we were trying to add some features into his current application. Some of the content was revised a bit and we removed the specific notes that mentioned the actual client and specific points that exposed that company. The application was part desktop and part as web-based solution.

We inherited this application from another dot net developer and before him there was another company that worked on that app.

The design of the database was all over the place and a lot of data redundancy. Some of the DLLs were depreciated and in order to accomplish what we need, we had to re-write some major code.

We avoided that since it was an old technology and it was not cost effective to re-write some parts in that old app.

We made some improvements in the code and in the database. The client is still working with this old application. His respond to the below points were very positive.

#1 You’re Selling the Technology

One key point is embracing the fact that the product you are selling your clients are not the travel tours. There are certainly other businesses that sell travel tours for students or otherwise. But what makes your clients come to you and not a competitor is the technological aspect of the business. Having a good online presence is important. User satisfaction is the main thing that separates a successful product from a non-successful one.

As such, providing convenience is one way to ensure user satisfaction. Giving your users the option to pay online, check for updates online, and sign up for tours online from the comfort of their own home, without complicated forms to fill-in or long phone calls with a customer service provider, is one of the reasons users stick with you.

Consolidation is also important. Currently, the way the system works is that end-users access a website hosted in a CMS system, while back-office users use local desktop apps which require direct access to the database. This in itself brings forward a whole set of issues regarding performance, conflicting transactions, and most of all, security.

Consolidating the system into one unified web application will allow your employees to do their administrative tasks from any machine, without any prior installation necessary, and using secured communication protocols. Our Dot Net Developers can help you to gain these productivity and security benefits.

Having all business logic be stored in a central location ensures no mismatching between different app versions, and ensures once an update is deployed, all users are hit instantly. Being able to provide these benefits is just one of the reasons that you want a SQL consulting firm developing your custom software. The back end of the system will ensure that there is no duplicate data.

#2 Real-time Data Allows You to React to Trends in the Industry

It is essential to be able to keep your product in trend with new philosophies in usability, performance, and accessibility. The current technology stack is both limited in what can be achieved with reasonable custom software development time, and it puts practically insurmountable roadblocks in the path of maintaining and fixing mission critical bugs or adding indispensable features.

Take, for example, the ACH payment feature, which was conservatively estimated as a 40-hour job but turned out after deeper inspection to be in the range of 100+ hours. This just one example of how our Dot Net Developers have been running into obstructions throughout the process. Another thing which must be addressed is the way user payment information is stored, even though encrypted. If anyone could gain illicit access to the application server and extract the encryption keys, they can run off with the credit card information of thousands of users. The consequences of such an occurrence could be devastating.

Additionally, the database connection service makes it impossible to run custom queries. Making changes could dramatically increase performance.

These things must be addressed. Unfortunately, the current state of the code base, some rather poor design decisions for the database structure, and the very old technology stack make addressing these issues virtually impossible without a massive overhaul. As more code is patched on, the code base becomes more brittle, and the technical debt accumulates (meaning each subsequent addition becomes harder than the last). It happens because the framework itself makes it problematic to add or adjust certain features.

You may have also noticed that lately, there is a push for using Artificial Intelligence to automate rudimentary tasks or even decisional ones, which would decrease the cognitive effort and workload of your administrating staff. Should you ever consider applying such patterns to your business, the current implementation would be very prohibitive in that regard, so you need to think about the salability of the system.

In essence, rewriting the software now rather than later would help to future proof your business, by adding scalable and secure features.

#3 You Gain Advantages from Using Current Tech

Using modern technologies such as .NET Core and Angular can offer many advantages.

Firstly, instead of using a heavy framework (such as XAF) which greatly limits the way features can be implemented, you and your Dot Net developers can maintain full control over all the necessary details, behavior, and performance of your platform.

Using a modern front-end framework such as angular can greatly improve performance and responsiveness. Each action that is executed within the application can bring a rapid response without having to reload the page for each action a user would perform. This can be done by developing the platform as a single page application.

A modern implementation can also allow for quality of life features such as live notifications through the browser when important events happen. It enables potential future integrations with other platforms/services such as social media or calendar systems.

In Conclusion

Simplifying the current implementation and workflows will allow your employees to accomplish more work in less time, improving their efficiency. Think of how tedious the process of setting up the progress payments for a tour is. We could, for example, greatly improve this with a modern UX approach, such automatically spreading the tour cost in equal sized payments. Then we can allow the employees to change the percentages using sliders that automatically adjust the other values.

Using a modern UI framework allows us to develop a responsive user interface, meaning it will automatically adapt its size for the user’s device. It can work for a mobile phone or a tablet. Current studies show that more than 50% of web traffic is served to mobile phone devices, so by not having a mobile responsive website, you can be missing out on roughly 50% of potential users.

Another important point is that modernizing the app is what brings the possibility to easily add new features that can greatly improve user retention and engagement (think conversion rates and return users). It would be easy to use machine learning to automate the user engagement process. For example, using emails or other notification systems, we can remind users of the fun they had on their last tour and suggest tours they may enjoy in the future.

Remember, the shorter time required to add new features, the less money spent to add them. Another related aspect is that there are parts of the application that are simply broken and do not work due to missing/expired licenses for products which no longer exists.

Remember, the shorter time required to add new features, the less money spent to add them. Another related aspect is that there are parts of the application that are simply broken and do not work due to missing/expired licenses for products which no longer exists.

One additional possibility for future improvement is the addition of feedback quizzes for individual group members, group leaders, organizers, and the tour facilitators. Important data can then be leveraged to optimize and improve the business or train other Artificial Intelligence algorithms.

Having a modern and available API can allow you to spread your online presence. For example, you may want to create a chatbot that can communicate with users, book tours, and answer questions. This can reduce the expense of customer support services and is just one more way that our Alpha AnyWhere developers can save you money.

Performing the software rewrite not only will allow us to address many pressing issues with less effort but will also open the door for many future improvements. Overall, it will be less costly to add on to a modern solution than to an old one. This will allow your business to be faster, smarter, more secure, and overall improve its success. Since we are also database experts, you don’t have to worry about finding a custom applications development team and a separate SQL consulting service. So, you get all of the experience and know-how you need on your side in one convenient package. For more info call us: 732-536-4765.