The need
A technology leader in the satellite broadband communication market, decided to outsource the development of its AAC subsystem, which is a part of their Satellite Communication solution. The company's two-way broadband satellite communications system provides fast and efficient Internet, Interactive Multimedia and wide-ranging IP applications to even the remotest locations. The original application was written by a third party company and our client no longer had persons inside the company who could support this application, therefore they turned to Softjourn to help them make updates to the application and help them improve the support process for the application.
The Solution
A wide variety of work was performed by the team of two software engineers and one QA tester over the course of four months. The tasks performed included:
- Improvements to the redundancy process,
- Migration from Oracle database to an open-source db – MySQL,
- Develop a set of test cases for the entire application.
The server's subsystem our team was working on is configured in an active-passive mode, in other words one instance of it is set to be the primary and another instance of AAC is secondary. In case one of the two instances hangs or crashes unexpectedly, the redundancy mechanism automatically has the other instance become the primary thus there is no loss of service for Shiron’s customers.
The original database for the subsystem was the licensed db, Oracle. Softjourn's client wanted to move to an open-source solution. To aid in the migration, a script was created by the team which detected where an Oracle-based schema existed and converted it to a MySQL schema.
Originally test cases did not exist for the application. Therefore every time a change was made it was difficult to assure that all possible situations were tested before moving a new change to production. Softjourn’s QA Tester on the project created test cases to cover a whole range of possible scenarios that the AAC subsystem has to work under, including “simulating bad weather”.
The Benefits
The server's stability was increased, mainly due to a strong Redundancy mechanism developed for the server. The application costs less to maintain given the move away from licensed database software, and it has become easier to maintain, quickly modify and be assured that the changes will not affect the smooth running of the application, given the test scenarios which can be quickly executed by the client's staff.