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Title: Editorial: Production legacy
Author: Martin Moene
Date: 09 May 2017 09:16:30 +01:00 or Tue, 09 May 2017 09:16:30 +01:00
Summary:
Body:
I expect we’ve all had our moments of wishing for the demise – or perhaps better yet, obliteration – of some legacy system, usually where we ourselves hadn’t had a hand in its implementation, and we have our own opinions of what could have been done to make it better. Or at least, bearable. Sometimes the prospect of tearing an existing system down and rebuilding from scratch is incredibly alluring, but it is a luxury that we don’t get to indulge very often.
There is much debate in technology circles about what the term ‘legacy’ means, but one common definition is any system that’s being used for real work – i.e., it’s ‘In Production’. Some prefer a looser definition along the lines of having survived a version upgrade, but either way, projects either survive and become ‘legacy systems’, or they fail. Whether those that survive are successes, or merely not failures, is a debate perhaps for another time.
Even in a continuous delivery environment, where a deployed system undergoes almost constant change, it is still in some sense a legacy system after initial release, although the term seems to be frowned upon. This seems to be because ‘legacy’ is equated with ‘bad’, although its more general English definition is to do with handing something down as a gift. It’s also associated with ‘old’, which carries its own disparaging connotations in technology.
Still the fact remains that most of us spend most of our time working on – fixing, upgrading, maintaining, maybe even improving – legacy systems, rather than producing new systems from scratch. After all, if the majority of work was on new endeavours, that would mean that the majority of past projects had failed. Maybe we should start seeing the positive aspects of our ‘Legacy’ and strive to make our systems as welcome a gift to future generations of programmers as we are able.
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