Rebuilding an e-prescribing application when the old product was the only documentation
The original application had working behavior but little reliable documentation for why screens, workflows, and API calls worked the way they did.
This story comes from Chris Martinez’s prior professional experience and is not presented as a CAM Software client engagement.
The decision
Treat the migration as product and behavior recovery, and bring product ownership and QA into the work before release pressure peaks.
Observed result
The team recovered workflows screen by screen, traced undocumented API requests and responses, and rebuilt the mobile product in React Native. The delayed release also exposed a leadership and QA-readiness gap that future migrations must address earlier.
The decision, visualized
Undocumented → transferable
The running legacy product became an evidence source for behavior, APIs, QA, and ownership.
The situation
Xamarin deprecation made migration a responsible proactive decision. The technical destination was React Native, but the harder problem was preserving product behavior when written intent, screen rationale, and API documentation were missing.
Behavior archaeology
The team ran the Xamarin and React Native applications side by side, moved feature by feature, logged requests and responses, and reconstructed what each workflow needed to accomplish. Existing lightweight APIs helped, but the team still had to recover how to use them.
The leadership lesson
The product was technically approaching release before the organization had assigned enough knowledgeable QA and product ownership to validate parity. That created a late scramble and contributed to a release after the original target. The codebase was not the only system that needed a migration plan.
What changed afterward
The experience directly informed later documentation automation: pull requests, workflows, test context, and application knowledge should be recorded while people still have it. A product that depends on one person’s memory is already carrying transition risk.