<story><title>The Birth of Legacy Software – How Change Aversion Feeds on Itself</title><url>https://software.rajivprab.com/2019/11/25/the-birth-of-legacy-software-how-change-aversion-feeds-on-itself/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vearwhershuh</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve seen plenty of projects blown up with massive, fearless refactors to do thing &amp;quot;the right way&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Careful with that axe, Eugene.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seren</author><text>In my open office next door, people have been refactoring a cpp98 monolith into more interdependent components to be able to have a better test suite, better CI integration, better deployment story. That sounds about right.&lt;p&gt;Well, the issue is that they have done it a bit sneakily, they removed all the legacy code they haven&amp;#x27;t understood. So the code is much more elegant, it has been moved to cpp11 or 14, it ticks every good practice. There is only one slight issue : it does not work. It somewhat work, but is not reliable and fails regularly in unexpected ways. And they&amp;#x27;ve started 5 years ago, and haven&amp;#x27;t been delivering any business value since then.&lt;p&gt;At the beginning, it was okay because they had some leeway but now they are blocking the release of new products, and our market share is in free fall.&lt;p&gt;Heads have started to roll.&lt;p&gt;To be fair, a few years down the line, their team will likely be more productive and efficient, but I am still not sure that the cost of the rewrite was justified. Still the article is very on point on the risk of not paying your technical debt.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Birth of Legacy Software – How Change Aversion Feeds on Itself</title><url>https://software.rajivprab.com/2019/11/25/the-birth-of-legacy-software-how-change-aversion-feeds-on-itself/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vearwhershuh</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve seen plenty of projects blown up with massive, fearless refactors to do thing &amp;quot;the right way&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Careful with that axe, Eugene.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cjfd</author><text>One thing to watch out for, I think, is people who want to do this massive refactor (an oxymoron as another comment notes) and also have a work history consisting entirely of short employments. These people never get to experience the actual result of their refactoring.</text></comment>