A tool for measuring the migration time of an Oracle Form to ADF
Your company is dubious whether to migrate its Oracle Forms to some of the newer technologies like Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF)? There are many question marks such as:
- Manual or automatic migration?
- Migration to ADF, Java or .Net?
- How much will it cost?
- Will the users like the end result?
- How much time will it take?
- Should my Oracle Forms developers need to learn Java?
- …………..
These questions are all complicated as every migration project is something huge and totally custom. There should be an initial stage which takes between one and three months depending on the quantity of the Oracle Forms during which you work closely with an experienced ADF consultant who by the end will be able to address most of the above concerns. The migration being a tedious but inevitable process can be really expensive and time consuming. Estimation of migration of each form is highly individual, but usually consists of:
- how many canvases are used in the form?
- how many input/output fields there are?
- how many LOVs and record groups?
- how many buttons with custom logic?
- how many triggers and lines of code do they have in them (e.g. ON-FORM-LOAD, ON-NEW-RECORD-INSTANCE)?
- how many calls to reports or other forms?
- how many DB procedure and functions calls?
When you take these in consideration you can reach a good approximation of effort needed. However there are certain things that cannot be measured, such as how complex the custom logic is, how complex is the relationship between master-detail records, etc.
Imagine how good it will be if there is a free tool which can predict with an accuracy of 80% (because of the mentioned above) how long will the migration normally take. Knowing the rates you can then make a really good prediction on how much it will cost you with a deviation of 20%. You will download the software for free, will upload the Oracle Forms and it will come up with the results based on the variables inside. The software will be written by highly experienced professionals that have migrated hundreds of Oracle Forms manually.
Do you think such a tool would be of help? Your feedback is really valuable to us and the Oracle Forms community? Share anything from concerns to questions and we will be happy to respond. All we need is a prolific dialogue for the solutions to appear!
Stoyan Mitov
Blogger at JAXenter, business development director at Dreamix, co-founder at Grajdanite.bg and active sportsperson by passion.
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