Insurance · WinDev & WebDev
Taking over a WinDev claims application whose only developer was retiring
A claims management application written in WinDev over fifteen years, undocumented, maintained by a single person three months from retirement. Goal: guarantee continuity without a rewrite.
- Sector
- Insurance
- Size
- 40,000 users, 1,200 employees
- Service
- WinDev & WebDev
- Model
- Audit then maintenance
- Duration
- 3-week audit, maintenance ongoing
Context
The application handles the entire claims declaration and settlement flow. It is used daily by claims handlers and by the agent network. No other provider consulted would take it over without a rewrite project quoted at more than eighteen months.
The problem
- No architecture or business-rule documentation
- WinDev version at end of vendor support
- Total dependency on one person retiring within three months
- No reproducible test environment, development done in production
- Backups existed but restore had never been tested
What we did
- Three-week takeover audit paired with the outgoing developer, before departure
- Mapping of analyses, procedures, reports and HFSQL dependencies
- Rebuild of a test environment from an anonymised dataset
- Real restore test executed and documented
- 90-page takeover note, written to be usable by a third party
- WinDev version upgrade then handled as a separate project, with regression testing on regulatory reports
Results
- 0
- days of downtime
- 3 sem.
- to secure the takeover
- 90 p.
- of documentation created
- 2
- trained contacts
What remains
The application is still in production and has not been rewritten. The client avoided a rewrite project quoted at over €400,000 that they had neither the budget nor the need to launch. The migration question will be reopened when a business need justifies it.
« The only provider who offered to maintain rather than rebuild everything. We had the takeover note checked by a third party: it holds up. »
Stack
- WinDev
- WLangage
- HFSQL
- SQL Server