From Legacy to Modern C++: Improved Security System

ABBAS, a Czech manufacturer of physical security technology, faced growing pressure in a highly competitive industry without sufficient in-house development capacity. To keep their systems reliable and future-ready, they turned to Roboauto for expert support in modernizing and improving their software.

„The Roboauto team brought not only experience with modern technologies but also new development methods, and a proactive approach and communication. Working with this company has made our product more powerful, more stable and our response to market demands faster.“

― Petr Kellner, Managing Director

Goals:

• Get a quick and overall understanding of the system and its architecture to ensure the system’s stability while modernising,
• modernize the technology stack to make the work more efficient,
• speed up the responsiveness of the system to improve end-user experience,
• getting a chance to attract new developers to work on an up-to-date system.

„The guys from Roboauto were available for a debugging session even when rock climbing in the mountains!“

― Martin Gabriel, Head of Development

Challenges:

• Legacy codebase,
• legacy compiler support,
• limited availability of the codebase authors,
• non-standard proprietary protocols, and solutions to communications.

Solution:

Our Roboauto team successfully compiled a modern compiler for the target platform, modernized the technology stack (from C++11 to C++23, coroutines for asynchronous communication of components, …), and deployed standardised libraries in favour of proprietary approaches (MySQL, asio, …).

This led to:

• reduced complexity and better maintainability (reduction of code lines by 50 %) = easy to work with for developers
• improved system speed and performance = more pleasant interaction for end users
• fewer bugs = increased customer satisfaction

“Thanks to the help of Roboauto, our system is much faster now. They sped up the configuration upload by more than 300 %.”

― Martin Gabriel, Head of Development

We have achieved all the goalsset at the beginning and we continue to develop the system further while making work on the codebase more attractive to other developers in Abbas.

All changes are driven by the goal of delivering value to the customer and the end-user and are carried out with support for and respect for ongoing business in mind. As you can imagine, this is key to the security industry.

If you wish to consult your C++ pains or need a development partner, reach out to us at: info@roboauto.tech