Migrating insurance lines from Flash to AngularJS at La Holando

La Holando Sudamericana ran several of its insurance lines on front ends built in Flash. The platform worked and the business ran on it.

Technical debt has a quiet urgency: when browsers discontinued Flash support, what was at stake was not aesthetics but the effective disappearance of the screens the company operated with.

• A deadline set from outside: the date was not the company's to choose but the browsers'.
• Operations in flight: the affected lines were producing, so there was no window to stop them.
• Concentrated risk: a monolithic migration puts all the risk in a single release.

The cost of not solving it was not gradual degradation: it was losing the ability to operate those lines overnight.

We ran the work as a line by line program rather than a monolithic migration, releasing functionality to production without stopping the business or concentrating risk.

And we scoped it to the presentation layer, which is what allowed modernizing without touching the core systems.

One line at a time

• Migration of the operational screens for the combined, transport and aviation lines and the endorsements circuit.
• Each line handled as its own project, preserving existing functionality on the new technology.

Short iterations, bounded scope

• Two week iterations, with three to four weeks per line.
• Agreed dates and effort, with explicit prerequisites and commitments from each side.
• Staggered releases the company could absorb without pausing operations.

Presentation layer only

• The migration consumes the company's existing services.
• The interface is modernized without touching business logic or the insurer's core systems.
• That shrinks the test surface of each release, which is why a line fits in three weeks.

Architecture and technology

• Front ends migrated from Flash to AngularJS on top of existing services.
• Team with technical leadership, senior front end profiles and senior QA per stage.

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Four operational fronts left a dead technology without the business losing a single day of production.

Starting point

• Operational screens for several lines built in Flash, with browser support discontinued.
• An externally imposed deadline and live operations on those very screens.

Strategic impact

• Four fronts migrated: combined, transport, aviation and endorsements.
• Three to four week releases per line, absorbable without pausing operations.
• Risk spread across releases instead of concentrated in one.
• Business logic and core systems untouched: the migration stayed in presentation.