Support Statement: How many programmers?

Q: How many programmers on my upgrade project will need gmStudio Licenses?

A. I recently had a prospect ask: If I have 10 programmers working on this project (for several years), converting VB6 & ASP, I will need 10 licenses right?

This particular prospect had a huge commercial application (approx 5M LOC; 20,000 ASP; 1,200 VBPs). IIt was a suite of products providing Retail ERP functions that had been developed over a 20 year period. There is no question that the upgrade would be a massive undertaking. However, this does not mean every programmer on the team must have a gmStudio license. It is more typical to have a subset of the product team working with gmStudio directly while other programmers do other types of work.

For example, during the project, some of your programmers will continue maintaining the legacy system for your customers. Our methodology does not require a code freeze: legacy system maintenance for business purposes development typically continues in parallel with the purely technical tasks of Upgrade Solution development. Updated legacy code may be brought into the Upgrade Solution development process periodically so that translations are kept in sync with the latest legacy code.

Another task your programmers may do for the project is defining VB6/ASP/COM upgrade, verification, and optimization strategies and building .NET code that will be part of the new system. Defining upgrade strategies is technical R&D done using common development tools like the VB6 IDE and Visual Studio; it does not require using gmStudio directly. gmStudio is used to implement and integrate upgrade strategies as a systematic, repeatable, automated processes. Of course is requires some collaboration, but implementing the upgrade solution with gmStudio does not have to be done by the same programmers who defined the upgrade strategies.

The reality is you should approach these projects as a rewrite, not a conversion. The tool is there to help you implement the upgrade solution that work is only one of the tasks you need to complete. Other tasks are design, verification, optimization, and transition. All of which require a more creative human touch.