Alion Science and Technology is a technology solutions provider delivering technical expertise and operational support to the Department of Defense, civilian government agencies, and commercial customers. Alion's MA&D Operation (www.maad.com) provides expertise in human-systems integration, human-factors engineering, computer simulation and modeling, and custom software development. Our main commercial simulation tool is Micro Saint Sharp, a discrete event network simulation software package for building models that simulate real-life processes. With Micro Saint Sharp models, you can acquire useful information about processes that might be too expensive, dangerous, or time consuming to test in the real world. Any process that can be represented by a flow chart can be modeled using Micro Saint Sharp (see Figure 1). Micro Saint Sharp is designed to be flexible for use in a variety of applications, including manufacturing, health care, air-traffic control, human performance, and military scenarios.
It's common for software products that have been around for more than 20 years to undergo numerous rewrites. Micro Saint Sharp is no exception. It was first developed in DOS and VAX, followed by a Macintosh version. In the early 1990s the product switched to Windows. When I first started working on Micro Saint Sharp in 2001, it was still being compiled on a 16-bit version of Borland C++. Although the product had served its main purpose, it had a few problems (including speed issues) and was starting to look dated in terms of the user interfaces. Because of these concerns, I came up with the idea of rewriting the application using new technologies. In particular, I believed that using third-party components would save hours of development time. In this article, I share the lessons learned in redeveloping and updating this commercial application.
