Enhancement of Delphi Software on DevExpress

Description

In this project, our client is a provider of product lifecycle management and product data management solutions exclusively for the food and beverage industry. They offer a fast-start, advanced solution that accelerates time to market, improves product quality, and uses digitization to increase revenue and ROI while maintaining global regulatory compliance and reducing manufacturing costs.

Our customer migrated his applications from Orpheus to the newest version of DevExpress using another company from India. As a result, numerous bugs started to appear. They turned to us, as their in-house developers were busy fixing other urgent bugs. The main goal of the project was to improve the Delphi system on DevExpress.

List of the first priority issues to be solved with the Softacom team help:

GDI issue (out of memory or out of resources) – The problem is the maximum of GDI objects where windows has Range: 256 – 65,536. Default value: 10000 and ~2000 GDI units are used per one running instance of PDM and there it means max 32 PDM instances in one VM.
Performance loading forms – DevExpress components are slower in loading and rendering of forms vs PDM 11 Orpheus.
Performance issues HTML5 rdp – Performance and stability of SpecPDM are significantly lower with HTML5-RDP vs Windows native RDP.
Automated Testing with Ranorex. Their in-house developers have limited experience with Ranorex, testing mostly manually. They would like to consider how to apply automated testing to their applications.

Client`s pain and concern

The migration of our application has caused numerous bugs and we would like to fix this. Our in-house developers are not enough to find and fix these bugs.

Project Team size

Project manager
3 Delphi developers
QA engineer

Solutions

During the first stage, Softacom team conducted a thorough analysis of application issues to get an understanding of their structure and possible bottlenecks, in order to be able to plan their solution. We consistently parsed the issues one by one.

In the process of reviewing applications, as well as in the process of maintenance and bug fixing, our team has identified a large number of factors that indicate the need for refactoring and optimization. Certain code nuances make it difficult to maintain, increasing troubleshooting time. There is a growing risk of program malfunction in places indirectly related to the issue being fixed. Code looks cluttered and difficult in places.

As a result of our work, we:

Simplified and restructured the source code and improved its quality.

Simplified program maintenance tasks, searching for and fixing bugs.

Optimized the work of the programs themselves, in the direction of increasing speed and rational use of memory resources.

Made it possible to use new methods and technologies in the further development of the software.

Provided a seamless migration to other programming languages, components and databases if necessary.

Increased the life cycle of programs.