A doctor's office application upgraded from Delphi 3 to Delphi XE 11.3
Industry
Medical, private practitioner office software, with direct data access to and from certain lab equipment.
Customer Concerns
- Upgrade from Delphi 3 to Delphi XE11.3
- Cost-effective update. The customer was cost-conscientious and had very strict deadlines.
- Many of the components used were obsolete or no source code available.
Actions Performed
- A team of developers were assembled to upgrade from Delphi 3 to Delphi 11.3
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Due to unknown or missing components, multiple upgrades was performed:
- From Delphi 3 to Delphi 7, then
- From Delphi 7 to Delphi 2009, then
- Delphi 2009 to Delphi XE 11.3
- Transition from BDE to Interbase
- HIPAA data security meant row-level encryption for data.
- Existing non-Unicode data had to be converted to Unicode.
- Ascii to Unicode data conversion from Medical Instrument data collection.
- Gitlab CI/CD environment created to automatically create installs.
Pain Points
- Source code wasn't available or missing. Many source files had to be reconstructed based on EXE file available.
- Ascii to Unicode conversion
- BDE to Interbase conversion
- Unknown components without source-code were phrased out and re-done using DevExpress.
Team Composition
- 1 Lead Delphi Developer
- 1 QA tester, also doing documentation.
Technology Utilized
- Delphi 3
- Delphi 7
- Delphi 2009
- Delphi XE 11.3
- Developer Express
Time Duration
The project was completed in 6 months.