Success Stories

Success Stories

Code Refactoring for a remote monitoring solution

Code Refactoring for a remote monitoring solution

A leader in remote monitoring and network management solution in North America was experiencing high maintenance cost in supporting different hardware variants for their monitoring solution. The customer was looking for a partner to make the maintenance and future feature upgrades at an optimized schedule and cost.

 

Solution Description

Refactoring

  • Gadgeon re-architected the existing software stack to cater to all variants of the customer’s product family and used  Embedded Linux, C++, Luci/ Lua
  • System management will read the hardware variant and generate a data model based on the number of IO points in the system.
  • Remote Firmware upgrade including the rootfs, os and application. Primary and secondary boot partitions for fail safe upgrade.
  • Multiple boot options with priorities (primary, secondary or USB)

Configuration Management

  • Developed a unified configuration management interface to support CLI, Web GUI and SNMP V2/V3.

Outcome and Benefits Delivered

Outcome:

  • Any feature on any hardware platform made a reality with otimal schedule and cost on the newly refcatored sotfware stack.  
  • Unified Monitoring and Alarm handling system implemented based on reusable database models
  • Unified Configuration management supports  Web GUI, CLI, and SNMP V2/V3
  • IP security features compliant with Federal Standards

Benefits:

  • 60% saving in total cost of ownership for supporting different hardware variants on the newly refcatored software stack.

System Architecture Description

Application Management

Event managers, Event generation/notification, Alarm Handler, Internal Faults and Statistics. POCO libraries for thread handling and notification between threads.

Protocol Management

Protocol libraries for TL1, TBOS, TABS,DCP/F, DCM, Port handling, Protocol Wrapper, Client proprietary protocols

Device Security

System boots only if pre-calculated checksum stored in EEPROM matches with file system checksum. Security enhancement with Ip tables, restricting port access, IP filters used for restricting source IP addresses.

System-Architecture-Description

Code Refactoring for the Project

Main Challenges

  • Mix of C and C++ code, 11  C++ libraries had to be integrated, as well as legacy C++ code.
  • Hardware interaction was in multiple places
  • Multiple functionalities as part of single module
  • Header files were not organized properly
  • Object oriented concepts were not followed
  • Multiple hardware variants having similar code was spread across two branches
  • Maintenance was difficult as modularization was not followed
  • DB was accessed haphazardly from all interfaces
  • Business logic was scattered across the code base.
  • Above 150K LOCs

Refactoring approach implemented

  • Converted all code to C++11 after proper object oriented design
  • Hardware interaction concentrated into a single module, interfaces defined
  • Singleton pattern brought in, and similar functionality grouped together
  • Base classes were defined to bring in common functionality, and diversions made into derived classes
  • Single compilation with defines for separate hardware variants
  • Modularization of code strictly followed
  • A framework defined for DB handling to unify external interfaces.
  • Business logic put in concentrated places
  • Proper thread handling and critical sections defined using mutexes


Download this Success Story
You may also like