The challenge
Gumby’s — a long-time client — manages video lottery and ATM machines across locations throughout West Virginia, and owns many of those locations outright. As a business licensed by and partnered with the State Lottery, it shares revenue with the state — which means the financial numbers it reports can’t just be close. They have to be exact, to the penny.
All of that data ran through a single 15-year-old Windows desktop application (WinForms), in use 12 hours a day, six days a week, pulling the numbers from every site. It still worked, but its time had come. They asked the obvious questions — could we rebuild it as a web application, and how long would it take?
What we did
We took a deep look at the existing app and the requirements underneath it, and scoped the rebuild as a .NET Web API backend with an Angular front end — about two months, we estimated.
One early decision kept the risk low: we built the new collection system against the exact same database the WinForms application already used. That meant all of Gumby’s back-office management and reporting systems kept working untouched — we were replacing the data-collection front end, not re-plumbing the whole operation.
It went faster than expected. Coding and QA were done in about three weeks — and not by cutting corners. Because the numbers had to reconcile to the penny, the build shipped with a full suite of automated tests: unit and integration coverage across the front and back ends, plus data-driven end-to-end tests that exercised the system the way the business actually uses it.
The outcome
Rather than rush it live, we ran a few weeks of side-by-side testing with Gumby’s — the new system and the old one running in parallel — to confirm the totals matched to the penny and to flush out real-world edge cases. We found a handful, added each one to the test suite (so it can never quietly come back), and released to production about two weeks ahead of the original deadline.
A 15-year-old desktop app became a modern web application — faster than estimated, accurate to the penny, and with the tests to prove it works and keep proving it. The automated suite didn’t slow the project down; it’s exactly what let us ship early, with confidence.