Upgrading ERS to .NET

A Government Agency (GA) uses the Electoral Register System (ERS) to import, export, maintain, and report a wide variety of information associated with the state Voter Rolls. The state voter rolls contain more than five million people that participate in state, municipal, and provisional elections. These elections and other ongoing activities depend on accurate, up to date voter rolls. ERS helps the GA ensure the accuracy of the rolls and provide roll information to authorized parties in a timely manner.

Project Scope

Originally developed in the early 2000’s, ERS is a mature Windows-based, 3-tier, client-server application. Implemented almost completely in VB6/ASP/COM/COM+ with SQL Server databases, the application had been performing reliably for decades. Other applications at the GA are web based and running on the C#/.NET platform.

The system was 101 inter-related VBPs. The client application used a composite application architecture with dynamic navigation. The front end included 263 forms and 121 "workspace" user controls. The back end included a job scheduler server and an application server hosting 60 service components running in COM+ and implementing almost 1200 different services. The service components made extensive use of COM+ transactions and role-based security. There was also an ASP classic web site that provided pre-formatted, interactive data tables to the client application. The application also automated Microsoft Office and over 160 Crystal Reports.

In the “ERS Technical Upgrade Project”, the GA upgraded legacy ERS from VB6/ASP/COM to C#/.NET whilst retaining the business logic and functionality of the application. The operation of the application remained on the desktop to preserve user experience and facilitate regression testing. The project included version upgrades for all infrastructure: new application servers, web servers, database servers, and virtual user workstations. The build and installation of the application was upgraded to fit within the latest security constraints and conventions of the GA environments and DevOps. The project also included work to update, document and validate the comprehensive functional regression testing procedures for the system.

In support of this effort, Great Migrations LLC (GM) provided technical services to the GA in the areas of system redesign, application development, deployment, and testing activities. The GM team included a technical PM, two .NET upgrade solution developers, and a QA lead. The client team included project leadership, support for DevOps, testing, and transition as well as two senior .NET developers collaborating on important technical challenges and decisions.

Project Schedule

The project schedule (23 months) from planning to completion is summarized below:

Open

Functional Equivalence

The critical measure of success for the project was passing all the formally documented and validated functional tests in both the system integration and user acceptance test environments. GM and the GA collaborated extensively on the tasks needed to meet this objective, beginning with seven months of test case definition, documentation, and validation using the legacy system. More than 3,000 test cases, comprising about 60,000 test steps, were created to define the functional scope of the legacy system. The test information was stored in an Azure Devops Test Plan which was used throughout the project for work management and progress tracking.

Technical Enhancements

The primary deliverable produced by GM was the C#/.NET version of the ERS legacy system. This code was produced by a completely automated, rule-driven translation process -- achieved through GM's agile Tool-Assisted-Rewrite methodology. This Custom Upgrade Solution for ERS reads, interprets, and rewrites the legacy system-- comprising 101 VB6 projects referencing 1.46M VB6 lines of code (LOC), 17 ASP pages, and 69 external COM type libraries -- and produces ERS.NET -- a collection of 132 .NET projects referencing ~900K of C# LOC. Also generated by gmStudio, the resulting .NET projects are organized into a VS2022 solution that integrates the full ERS application stack and its dependencies for debugging and development. The GM Team also developed other assets to facilitate application debugging and automated deployment of the distributed application into dev and test environments.

As summarized below, the upgrade process delivered a number of major technical features:

• COM Upgrades

• COM+ Upgrade

• Upgrade Solution and Build/Package Pipeline

• ASP Site Upgrade

• Structural Upgrades

• Language Upgrades

• gmRTL Components and xUnit Tests

• PDF995 Replacement

• Custom CodeStyle

COM Upgrades

Thirty COM API upgrade features were developed for the ERS Custom Upgrade. Where appropriate, Migration Unit Tests were developed to assist with researching and testing upgrade details independently of testing them in the integrated ERS application. In some cases, COM APIs were replaced by hand-coded .NET APIs starting from the support framework stub classes generated by gmStudio then extending or encapsulating .NET APIs. The table below summarizes the COM upgrades developed for RMS.