You own an existing application that is important to your organisation but it’s been left behind somehow. Your programmers see working on it as a tour of duty. People will refer to it as legacy and suggest that the whole application should simply be rewritten. So the overall picture looks a lot like a rainy day in late November. But as a seasoned owner of custom-made software, you are aware that the vast majority of re-write projects are doomed.
I don’t like the word ‘legacy’, I prefer ‘working software’ and as such it needs to be treated with respect. A better approach is to refactor your application out of the maze it somehow (it is interesting to wonder why, isn’t it?) got caught in. This must be done by one small incremental change at a time with a defined end-goal. So with patience and careful planning, your application comes out the other end of this revitalisation-process much healthier and with your engineering team eager to start adding the new features your organisation is craving.
And oh, let’s try and put some habits into place so the inevitable impact of software-entropy can be controlled.