React was supposed to ease our development. Instead, it created roadblocks
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It’s summer 2018. My boss, Adrian, asks me to join him in a Skype call with James, the CTO of a big Canadian company.
While getting to know each other, I find out that James is a smart guy with big ambition. His vision is to migrate a massive desktop WPF application to the web in the cloud.
I like his friendly attitude and I can tell that he is eager to collaborate with us. He already has a development partner in India, but they lack experience in building web applications.
Adrian and I follow the standard approach for this situation. We have a few more calls and then we start the discovery phase in which we try to grasp the big picture and find the non-functional requirements. These are the main points we should focus on:
- A big application — more than 220 pages, most of which are maintenance screens and around 20% of which are highly customized.
- Display large amounts of data, especially in grids with all kinds of features: grouping, column freezing, row expand, custom columns, you name it.
- Modular architecture allowing multiple teams to work on the project at the same…