Real-World Maintainable Software

Chapter 4. Ten Real-World Use Cases

Perhaps the most important takeaway of this report is the fact that the Ten Guidelines aren’t just a theoretical exercise. In fact, the guidelines were created after examining what made software projects successful and maintainable, and once created, SIG applied them successfully to real-life projects.

In this chapter we will see 10 business cases where the Ten Guidelines were applied successfully.

Interamerican Greece

Interamerican Greece, or IAG, is the top insurance company in Greece. In 2010, it had 1,400 employees and worked with 1,800 intermediaries to provide insurance to more than one million Greeks. But by that time, the market was beginning to change. On one side, customers wanted to buy insurance directly from the insurer via the Internet; on the other side, intermediaries wanted to have more e-commerce options. IAG responded to the challenge to become the first company in Greece to sell insurance over the Internet.

However, the increased reliance on IT to drive business exposed a significant risk: much of IAG’s IT infrastructure had suffered from years of underinvestment—some of the systems were 40 years old. Failures couldn’t be completely ruled out, and these would be directly visible to the client, which would damage their reputation. IAG needed a new strategy.

The in-house programmers had already migrated some older systems to a newer Java platform, and the main question at IAG was whether this was the right approach for the ...