Are You Looking for Ways to Decrease Your Technical Debt While Saving Money?

May 27, 2020

After several years of focusing on delivering new capabilities to the business, Dewpoint’s client (a major insurance provider) realized they had accumulated significant technical debt.  Specifically, hundreds of legacy Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) needed to be re-engineered from SOAP to RESTful services to gain efficiencies in end user performance and savings in ongoing software maintenance.  Other business critical projects left them lacking the bandwidth to address this technical debt.  In addition, the client was experience performance issues due to the continued use of legacy APIs, further straining their IT resources.

Dewpoint, in conjunction with our client, created a dedicated technical development team with the sole focus on addressing the legacy API technical debt.  The client required the current business logic to match the output generated by the old code.  However, the old code had few documented test cases, making it impossible to leverage test case development and testing to meet acceptance criteria, the team chose a non-traditional approach of use the original code as the source for the new API functionality “requirements”.

Working as an Agile scrum team, Dewpoint is re-engineering almost 500 legacy APIs from SOAP to RESTful microservices.  The team is removing references to end of life middleware, creating documentation and test cases to support the new code, and applying efficient coding principles resulting in a decrease in total number of lines of code and in required queries to the database – all while maintaining legacy business logic and API input/output requirements.

Results to date:

• 88 endpoints developed as of May 2020
• Reduction of 62,500+ lines of code resulting in a client estimated cost savings of about $750,000 annually
• Average 76% line of code reduction
• Average 94% database query reduction
• Average 70% reduction in response times for services converted from SOAP to REST

The Dewpoint approach includes weekly design sessions to share concepts to allow everyone to share and adopt.  The consolidation of redundant SOAP methods with a view-based REST API approach ensures future code maintainability – as well as enabling scalability and high performance of the new services.

To find out more about how Dewpoint can help you reduce technical debt or more information about engaging Dewpoint for a similar project, click here.