Architectural Risk Assessment — Building Robust Financial Software, A Case Study
Kommuninvest finances the development of Sweden’s local and regional sectors, as well as investments for a sound and sustainable society.
Project Background
Kommuninvest wants to better serve their customers by providing a web portal where customers can quickly compose quotation requests. The entered data should directly populate an online database for review and handling by automated workflows and non-technical front office teams.
The existing solution requires a Kommuninvest employee to receive requests from customers, either by phone or by email, and enter the data manually into a database using an in-house desktop application. This manual process causes bottlenecks and unnecessary processing time when dealing with customer enquiries.
Problem Statement
The new web-system is written in JavaScript and C# and based on a microservices architecture composed of Microsoft Azure platform-services. The existing in-house application instead uses multiple .Net languages and a legacy client-database architecture pattern. These very different applications have to interact in handing of requests to each other, and Kommuninvest needed to implement changes to business processes in the in-house application.
The challenge was understanding the impact of changes to the legacy desktop application and estimating the risk and time to make these changes.
Problem Solution
Verifa were brought into the project for a 3-day workshop to assess the architecture of the desktop application, identify the components to be refactored and perform different levels of impact analyses on relevant components and finally deliver a report to help Kommuninvest make an informed decision.
Verifa used a software architectural visualisation tool, Lattix, to produce an Architectural Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM) of the existing code base. This model allowed Verifa consultants to visualize the components and dependencies across the system and perform deep impact analysis.
Verifa delivered a comprehensive collection of reports to allow Kommuninvest engineers to fully understand their software architecture.
Verifa is an R&D-based services company with the aim of enabling software teams to produce higher quality systems at a higher velocity, continuously.
