Service purchase, from Oracle Forms to a Spring platform
A thirty-sprint rebuild of service-purchase processing out of Oracle Forms and into a Spring platform spanning the member and employer portals.
The constraint
Service purchase lets a member buy credit toward their pension. It's one of the more involved things a pension system does: eligibility rules, cost calculations, payment plans, employer records and member records all have to agree. All of it lived in Oracle Forms, inside a larger Oracle modernization program with its own clock. The forms worked. They just couldn't change at the speed the business needed, and only a few people could change them at all.
The decision
Rebuild it on the Spring platform the rest of the estate was moving to, with web flows for the member and employer portals, batch for the scheduled work, integration for the systems around it, and event-driven messaging where one side shouldn't wait for the other. Not a port of the screens. The rules came out of the forms and into code with tests, which was the first time most of them had been written down in one place.
What it cost
Thirty sprints. The trap in a rebuild like this is feature parity, where every quirk of the old system becomes a requirement for the new one. Each quirk had to be argued: keep it because a rule needs it, or drop it because it was only ever a limitation of the form.
What shipped
Service-purchase processing on the new platform, across both portals, with the business rules in code.
What it showed
The modernization that lasts is the one that gets the rules out of people's heads and old screens and into tests. Everything else is a framework choice.