CASE STUDY
Neptunus cuts in half the time for understanding a ‘black box’ application
Neptunus is an engineering services provider of software-based asset management and repair solutions for the Energy, Marine, Industrial, Oil & Gas, and Defense sectors.
CAST Imaging enabled the Engineering team to quickly gain understanding of an application they had no prior knowledge of and then speed up delivery of on-going enhancements.
I was frankly amazed how intuitively CAST could map out complex applications
Narendra Kumar
Head of Engineering
50% faster
discovery and
documentation
5 weeks
to fully understand the application with no prior knowledge
5 weeks
to fully document the inner workings of a 500 KLOC application
Challenge
Neptunus acquired a company with a key application and realized it was modified for a decade, without streamlined QA or documentation.
To gain control of the complex software, customize and deploy it bug free, the firm had to fully analyze and understand all components, document them, debug the code, and map out all dependencies to maintain and govern the application consisting of 500,000 lines of code across C++, C#, and MS SQL.
They quickly realized that manually reverse-engineering the code would be very error-prone and can take months, at best.
Solution
The Head of Engineering spoke to technical colleagues about the significant challenges the Neptunus team faced and a colleague at Microsoft suggested CAST Imaging.
The software intelligence product would enable the team to understand the legacy software architecture nearly instantaneously.
That was a far more compelling option than employing several resources to undertake the extremely time-intensive tasks around researching and documenting the complex code base.
Results
After a brief RFP process, Neptunus deployed CAST Imaging to AWS.
After about five weeks, the team was able to fully understand the code architecture, all its calls, expired dependencies, its overall framework, and the “path of least resistance” for documenting, modernizing, and maintaining the application.
After another 5 weeks, the team also fully documented the application.
Overall, Neptunus were able to accelerate application discovery and documentation efforts by 50%. Now, the team plans to leverage CAST Imaging to speed up delivery of on-going enhancements.
