Legacy System - out of the dark ...

Each time there is some different story behind. Each solution is unique, each implementation is one and only. 

Sometimes it is the COTS kind of a system, with some vendor behind, sometimes this is our own development which is getting older, and sometimes this is a mixture of both.

There are four well-known solutions to the problem of Legacy Systems, but ... imagine they are out of reach ...

You cannot simply turn it off

This is not some auxiliary system, this is the Core, the heart of your company. After so many years of development the solution is just for you, everything is in harmony, people, other IT solutions, departments even ... everything (there is the dark side of this perfection, but I will let it reveal itself in next posts)

You cannot upgrade fundaments/components of the System

Sometimes this would have been enough, couple simple steps of upgrading your underlying components: your database, your operating system, middleware solutions … and once again you run away from the technological debt.

But what if there are no natural continuations available? Long story short - we have stuck with quite old version of jBASE database and its native programming language jBASIC.

The story behind is quite complex and full of twists and turns but the final result is ... final. For all those not knowing the context - the jBASE itself is growing and evolving and it looks quite promising ... but it is out of reach.

You cannot upgrade the System itself

I suppose – this might be the most obvious choice – this would be the vendor who is responsible for the technological debt and your company would be in the path of continuous upgrades. Each couple years you start The Upgrade Project, you do it with the vendor support, number of experienced consultants and with the BigBang approach you start bright new chapter in your company’ life ... each time, once and again.

But put yourself in a position where, because of years of development, even with the vendor support, you cannot simply upgrade, the product gap is too big … it is no longer possible.

You cannot replace it with yet another System

So maybe you should move all your business to something new ...

The consequences are quite obvious: massive project, with lots of consultants, engaging both IT and business. Working with requirements only would be insane and in fact it would cause business development to freeze … and all this in the era of demanding regulatory projects.

At mBank we have seen at least 2 migrations like that and it is kind of a paralysis, It is heavy and kind of raping the organization, but … it is doable !.

So maybe, we shall think about this as a last resort solution, big companies like big projects.

What now ? Is there the way out of the dark ?

Having the last resort option we have decided to take a try and see if there is any alternative path out there. To make things clear, the Legacy System does not necessarily mean something negative. It is more like the heritage … it is tailored to our needs, with some bright ideas under the hood it was choice number one all those years before, and maybe it still is …

What if you could have your ancient system:

? in modern technologies - like C# .NET

? with the support of state of the art tools - there are tons of those only waiting to help

? with bright new User eXperience

? with quality assured and proved by number one developer experience, a lot more than just simple, black terminal screen

One would say that having all those in one place would be a miracle, that one needs to be really greedy to dream about this ... but it is possible. We have found that path.

The future ...

Just to make you interested and waiting for the next articles - this would be about:

• how to organize the migration of your old style programming language, 3m lines of code, into modern C# .NET
• how to gain from the transformation step by step
• what in fact does it mean - developer eXperience
• how to make this BigBang kind of a project ... the real agile endeavor
• what does it mean to be the engineer and the quote from Ender's Game