Methodology

Over the course of 450+ projects, Nexaweb has refined a repeatable methodology for transforming applications from expensive-to-maintain legacy architectures with limited accessibility into highly accessible web applications running on lower-cost cloud platforms.

Transformation Strategy: Nexaweb starts every customer engagement with a legacy application portfolio review. The driving principles behind this phase are to help customers identify areas within the application portfolio where there's the biggest pain and biggest modernization payoff. For each application, we look at user adoption, maintenance costs, value creation, opportunity costs of not transforming, and other factors to help decide what path the application will take into the future…transform, consolidate, re-platform, leave as is or end of life. For those applications you want to transform, we specify how we'll do the actual transformation, and define a fixed-cost, fixed-price transformation project scope and schedule. 

Code Capture: Nexaweb has a lot of experience helping companies understand what parts of a legacy application can be reused. We review and profile the code in a workflow environment, figure out whether there are branches, where there are dead-ends, and whether there's code that can be leveraged. We also collect and evaluate screenshots to uncover reusable user interface designs.

Transformation: During this phase, we eliminate unusable old code and re-factor and re-platform reusable legacy code into a cloud-based services-oriented architecture (SOA). Then we create a rich internet application (RIA) interface that consumes the re-factored logic and delivers it to users over the web to any browser on any platform. The RIA is built fast, based on Nexaweb transformation software, which includes RIA development tools, a secure internet messaging bus, proven JAVA, and AJAX application reference frameworks that handle security, UI interactions, and other functions. Nexaweb software eliminates the risk and cost of developing application code that is common across most cloud applications. Finally, we test the application to ensure the transformation is working the way you envisioned. 

Deployment:  Initially, we typically roll transformed applications out to smaller populations of users in order to get feedback and refine the applications to their liking. This ensures stronger user adoption and more complete achievement of the business goals for the application. Gradually, the application is deployed to larger numbers of users on a variety of mobile and stationary computing platforms.

Nexaweb has followed this approach in hundreds of projects. The outcomes of each cycle are very predictable and allow Nexaweb to bear the risk of cost-overruns and eliminate the risk of delivery failure via its Fixed-Cost/Fixed-Time project guarantee.