Accelerate Your Legacy System Reengineering with Existing Assets

Introduction

Reengineering legacy systems can be a daunting and resource-intensive endeavour, but it is often a necessary step to keep up with evolving business needs. However, by strategically leveraging the valuable assets already embedded in the legacy systems, it's possible to significantly speed up the reengineering process and reduce overall costs.

The key is to recognize the inherent strengths of the legacy systems and repurpose them to your advantage. Let's explore how to unlock this hidden potential.

Existing Assets

Leverage Existing Domain Knowledge Legacy systems often contain a wealth of domain-specific information, including data models, processes, and terminology that have been refined over years of real-world use. This knowledge can provide a strong foundation for the new system's requirements, saving valuable time and effort.

By reusing accurate data and process terms, such as "client," "bank account," or "deposit," you can accelerate the communication about new requirements and the subsequent coding process. Additionally, analyzing the order and output of existing processes can help to understand what needs to be done, allowing to create a more efficient process organization without having to repeat the costly research and client/user interviews.

Capitalize on Technical Solutions Legacy systems have accumulated various configurations, settings, and optimization techniques over time. While some of these may be outdated or inefficient, they can still provide valuable insights and serve as a starting point for the reengineering effort.

For example, the licensing settings in a legacy banking system can be analyzed, reused, and enriched with other types of licensing information. Similarly, solutions for data chunking, process step ordering, load balancing, and cache strategies can help to understand current data flow limitations and possibilities, speeding up the reengineering process.

However, it's important to carefully analyze and estimate the performance solutions before reusing them, as some may have become inefficient over time due to the evolving system requirements.

Leverage Existing Documentation Legacy systems often contain a wealth of historical documentation, including functional specifications, technical design documents, and installation/configuration guides. This information can provide valuable insights into the system's development, the problems it was designed to solve, and the requirements of specific clients.

For example, legacy systems like SAP R/3 from the 1990s often had such documentation embedded in their source code repositories. Analyzing this information can help to understand the core functions that have remained unchanged, allowing to reuse of the relevant parts and accelerating the reengineering process.

Additionally, tools like Jira and Confluence can provide a deeper understanding of user preferences, domain changes, and market trends, further informing your reengineering efforts.

Utilize Existing Test Solutions Legacy systems that may contain various types of tests, such as unit, integration, or even database-specific tests. These tests help to understand the system's requirements and tasks, providing a valuable starting point for the reengineering process.

While it's important to analyze and verify the actuality of the test expectations, these existing test solutions can save significant time and effort in creating new tests from scratch.

Conclusion

By leveraging these four key assets – domain knowledge, technical solutions, existing documentation, and test solutions – you can dramatically speed up your legacy system reengineering efforts. This approach allows you to build upon the strengths of the legacy system while addressing its limitations, resulting in a more efficient and effective solution that meets your evolving business needs.

Embrace the value already present in your organization's technology stack and accelerate the digital transformation journey.

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