Moving a Development Team from C++ to Java?

Nicros asks: "I work for a company that is working toward an FDA approved software development process. We have always used C++ in a Windows environment, and we have more than 6 years of code, applications and libraries developed. Because of our long and convoluted software development history, our existing architecture is difficult to manage for a group of our relatively small size (5 FTEs), and development times are rather slow. Our IT director has made the decision that, to speed up development times, we need to re-architect all of our existing code, from C++ to Java." What would be the best way to go about handling such a migration? In a general sense, how would you go about moving a development team from one language to another? "Our IT director has hired a 3rd party (offshore) company assist us with this migration, and they have recommended that we change from C++ to Java, Spring and Hibernate. We are all professional programmers here, so learning Java is not a problem for those of us who don't know it. The real question is: what do we gain from moving to Java? Or conversely: what do we lose by moving away from C++? Additionally, will one language or another really help us to get FDA approval?

I personally am a bit suspicious of this solution. I find it more likely that the problems we have would persist across languages or architectures (lack of time and resources leading to buggy code, lack of direction from marketing, and so on). However, having not gone through this process before, I would be interested to hear any thoughts, stories of similar experiences, or pros and cons."

Comments

Re:What is your current application environment?

[Joseph Vigneau]

Since you mention Spring, I'm guessing that you're writing web applications. If you're not, then you need to tell your manager to jump off a bridge, as he has no idea what he's talking about.

I disagree- containers like Spring are useful for all sorts of applications, not just web-based ones. Stitching components together via configuration files, combined with aspects and "inversion of control" makes it a lot easier to build maintainable and extensible applications. There's nothing in the core Spring framework that shoehorns you into writing web apps.

That being said, the OP should probably stick with C++, unless there are much more compelling reasons than "the offshore consultants said to use Java, Spring, and Hibernate".

How are you validating?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Before you go and hire a bunch of off-shore'ers you need to hire an on-shore FDA compliance expert who can walk you through developing a CFR 21 Part 11 compliant development process. The funny thing about the FDA process is it doesn't recommend best practices rather it forces you to make a plan and stick to it (and document that). They want a paper trail should anything go wrong more than anything else, so problems can be indentified and fixed. You ought to do a bang-up job as well, for your company's competitiveness, but that's optional.

Expect to properly validate all your code with good test cases. This is probably a good thing for moving languages. Write a test case for the C++ code, validate that the C++ code works, implement the Java version, make sure the test case results are still the same. The JUnit tools might be helpful here, though I haven't used them personally.

Java gives you some advantages to write more robust code, especially among collaborators. But you can thwart that by doing try { } catch (Exception e) {} instead of catching the real exceptions. That's a matter of coding practices - you ought to mandate people catch actual exceptions thrown and call them girly-men if they don't. If you mandate it in your process they have to follow it or you won't be compliant.

I also find Bugzilla to be very helpful in an FDA-complaint process, using the VERIFIED status to mean 'validated'. CVS is really important, or probably Subversion today.

Over all you'll probably feel like you've done a better job as a software developer by using a good FDA-compliant process because bean counters can't force you to cut corners, though good work can be tedious. Beware they don't fool you into working crazy hours to make up for the additional workload.

Re:Logic check

[commanderfoxtrot]

This is probably a good place to mention SWIG: open source, mature - SWIG is an interface compiler that connects programs written in C and C++ with scripting languages such as Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl. It works by taking the declarations found in C/C++ header files and using them to generate the wrapper code that scripting languages need to access the underlying C/C++ code. In addition, SWIG provides a variety of customization features that let you tailor the wrapping process to suit your application.

From the FAQ:
Designed to work with existing C/C++ code. SWIG requires little, if any, modifications to existing code. For the most part, it encourages you to keep a clean separation between C/C++ and its scripting interface.

I haven't used it myself, but it sounds like it could help. At least you might be able to re-use your C++ code from Java.

I think it's lunacy to rewrite 6 years of code in a new language just for the sake of it.