Platform Upgrade For European Parliament

Project

Redwerk, as a software development outsourcing company, was assigned the task of upgrading part of the EUREL EUGI platform used by the European Parliament, taking care of integration, quality assurance, deployment, and bug fixing. The scope of the project was to migrate a legacy JBoss-based application to a modern, easy-to-maintain Spring/Tomcat-based one.

Challenges

• Very limited timeframe for the entire project. We were given a month to complete it.
• We were unable to deploy the entire system in-office for debugging. As per European Parliament security policy, most of the system’s components were available only in their building and could not be accessed for remote debugging.
• The components we worked with contained a great deal of business logic that needed to be translated to an entirely new technology stack without breaking contracts with external services.

Solution

• Thanks to our extensive experience in Java EE and Spring development, we were able to quickly decompose our work into smaller subtasks and plan further actions. This allowed us to easily coordinate work and manage EUREL expectations while keeping things organized.
• At the very start of the project, we established efficient lines of communication between all involved parties across the globe. People in Ukraine, Italy, and Belgium were coordinated and aware of current progress and challenges at all times. We also moved task and issue tracking from email and instant messaging to modern bug tracking software for easy management.
• One of the first things we did was set up a testing environment in our office. Developers made use of integration and unit tests to ensure that business logic and APIs functioned according to the EUREL project design.
• We also organized a workflow where code could be written in Ukraine and tested in Brussels the same day, allowing developers to receive instant feedback from future system users.

These measures allowed us to deliver a high-quality project, on schedule and fully tested, in spite of the limitations and constraints we faced.

We also proved once again that the option to outsource Java development to Redwerk can help every company to receive the best result.