Maintaining an enterprise software system is not walk in the park. The system is critical to the daily job of fleets of staff members across over 50 departments on the UCSB campus. As much alluring as 'greenfield development might be, the 'nuke and pave' solution is far too disruptive to be considered a viable option. Instead, the goal is to keep University business going: tracking proposals into grants, budgeting for payroll and other expenses while meeting grant requirements. The technology that presents these tools to the end user should not be apparent to them. Their workflows must support the changing business processes and every edge case must be considered.
This presentation will cover how a small team (of less than 2 dedicated FTE) have been able to maintain and enhance a successful software project for the last 18 years. Of greater interest, we will review the past 2 years of this project, which have seen a many infrastructure advancements and future facing prototypes. Archaic, black box technologies have been transparently replaced with testable code written in modern (ubiquitous) programming languages. These new components have seamlessly enhanced the reliability and response time of the application to all users. Prototypes have been built that can leverage Campus Authentication while utilizing Cloud services. These prototypes have provided indispensable insights into the architectural requirements of the next generation of this application.
Come and hear about our lessons learned in maintaining and modernizing a legacy application as we move towards migration to a cloud based solution.
Software development and/or management experience would be a helpful background.