Case Studies

Migrating a legacy Construction Design Software to new generation Managed environment deploying DirectX Graphics

The client provides powerful and professional structural engineering design software, and structural analysis software. These structural engineering software solutions have over 30 years of proven reliability.

Developed in cooperation with The Engineered Wood Society (American Plywood Association), this easy-to-use structural engineering software program analyzes, designs or checks continuous beams or columns with optional cantilevers, simple supports or fixed ends, and handles most any type of loading conditions as well. The product is designed to provide a design tool for engineers, architects, designers and other professionals involved in the design and specification of timber structures. The program analyzes, checks and designs timber beams and columns subject to simple and complex loading quickly and accurately. The software is more comprehensive than selecting members from a table, designing by hand and the other competing programs.

This is an essential tool for any designer who sizes single or multi-span beams and columns. The program was designed to be as comprehensive as possible, yet is very easy to use.

The original product was developed over a course of period under Borland C++ and utilized a vast number of Third Party components and libraries – which included graphics engines, translation libraries and data access components.  As time passed almost all these components got obsolete and it was becoming a sort of a challenge to obtain the necessary technical support for these components. The larger problem which the client was posed with was his ability to scale up the product to incorporate additional features and requirements. The product already had a vast customer base and in order to contain, retain and grow the product subscription a business decision had to be made to give a new lease of life to the product based on the contemporary technologies.

Technical managers and Engineers at Q3 immediately understood the technical problem faced by the client and proposed a migration of the product to new generation managed C++.net deploying DirectX based graphics libraries under Windows environment. Due to its vast popularity in Engineering and Design software’s C++ was the chosen programming language. Also, C++ stands out primarily because of its performance which obviously is an important benchmark in engineering environments. Direct X is an extremely popular graphics engine from Microsoft and works seamlessly with other Microsoft components.

The challenge now in front of Q3 was to quickly comprehend the architecture of the existing Borland based product and come out with a reliable porting strategy. Q3 quickly constituted a dedicated team of software architects, designers, developers and integrators for these tasks. The team first designed and successfully tested a prototype of a solution whose development was closely observed and appreciated by the client. One of the explicit goals was to replace all the Third component dependencies of the older version either with native Microsoft components or develop them as needed.

Q3 Technologies eventually migrated the Borland product to a new generation C++.net based scalable, reliable and high performance solution by focusing on following elements:

• Using best practices for Migration.
• Using VC++ .NET environment and all native components of Visual Studio to develop the software modules and impart robustness in their integration and as a result achieve a high performance solution.
• Identifying and deploying Direct X 9.0 Library in an optimized fashion for plotting graphical components and entities.
• An important milestone in developing such an ultra-modern solution is testing, which Q3 Technologies have always done par excellence. To test the solution, Q3 Technologies applied following techniques and methodologies:
• Constituted a testing team that fully understood solution’s technical aspect and worked closely in cohesion with development team and client.
• Developed programs that simulated original application to perform preliminary tests prior to testing with real application.

Architecture of the migrated product

• Client was immensely satisfied with initial prototypes and entrusted Q3 Technologies to develop complete solution in different timelines.
• Q3 Technologies always delivered solution’s modules much on scheduled time-line.
• Client satisfaction with the solution was driving force for awarding Q3 Technologies with complete responsibilities to scale-up as solution for many more projects and customizing for more possible scenarios.
• Client entrusted Q3 Technologies with responsibilities to provide complete customer-support on-demand services and many more associated tasks for years to come.
• Q3 Technologies achieved its goal to provide high quality solutions and become partner in client’s growth.
• The developed solution enjoys immense trust and popularity among end-users which continues to increase manifold