Introduction
We all want to keep ourselves updated. We keep on searching for the most trending things in any field be it fashion, food, gadgets or technology. There is an instant urge in most of us to try and get associated with the latest or trending thing.
Same is the case with our work or job profile. We want to work on projects that are in newer technologies. When we start our career we want to start with latest technology stack and when we are being allocated to a project that is for the maintenance of a legacy system we think we have been trapped and keep on finding ways to escape out. But that is not how we should deal with legacy systems. There are challenges in every system and we should try to find out ways to improvise and overcome the challenges.
When I started my career I wanted to work in Java as I had learnt Java in college and most companies had projects in Java but apparently I was allocated into a dotnet project.
I started looking into the code trying to understand , learn and implement our learning into the project. It is all about research, continuous learning and implementation that will benefit us as well as add value to the work we do for the clients.
When companies hire us as a fresher they watch us grow, and how we adapt to the projects, they keep aligning us with the tasks in which we are good at. Companies employ us to help them with their organizational goal. Afterall it is in the interest of both the company and our career.
In this post we will understand how working in a legacy project can also be fun and full of learning.
What is a legacy system ?
With the context of this post we are referring to the Legacy Systems as older software, hardware, or technology that is still in use, even though newer and more efficient systems or technologies are available. These systems were often developed with outdated methodologies or technologies, but they continue to be critical to the functioning of an organization.
Some of the characteristics of Legacy Systems are -
- Outdated Technology - These systems were built many years back in the past and the technology in which these systems were originally developed are outdated today. These systems might be developed in outdated programming language or these system might run on hardwares that are very old and the current hardware does not support the older technology.
- Lack of Documentation - Legacy systems often suffer from poor or missing documentation, making it difficult for developers to understand or modify the code. Over time, knowledge about the system may become isolated with certain individuals who have worked on it for a long time.
- Critical to Operations - Despite their age, legacy systems are often essential to a company’s core operations. They may manage critical processes, such as customer data, financial systems, inventory management, or production. They are sometimes a major source of company's revenue.
- Difficult to Maintain - These systems are difficult and expensive to maintain. Sometimes its very hard to get developers with the required skillset to work on these systems. There is a great chance of breaking the system if the code modified is not properly tested and all the scenarios are not covered.
- Vulnerable to Attacks - These systems are vulerable to attacks if the components are not upgraded or replaced regularly.
- Overlooked best practices - Legacy systems may have undergone significant customization over time to meet the evolving needs of the business. This might lead to overlooking best coding practices to meet the deadlines of business leading to tight coupling of components making it challenging to change later.
Why are legacy systems important ?
Software industry is not new and it has been there since many decades. What looks like an outdated technology now was once a revolutionary innovation decades back. Systems developed decades ago has been the backbone of how businesses have continued and how those systems have benefited everyone. With time those systems have grown up at a fast pace and scale . Lots of business analysts ,architects and developers have worked on those systems with their best capabilities keeping the system up to date with modern standards without impacting the business.
With the growing speed of technological advancements it is not possible to spend the entire time , money and efforts in continuously migrating every legacy systems to the latest technology. That’s the reason why legacy systems exists and is important for the business.
It is thus not possible to migrate every single project to latest tech stack after all its all about business.
Technology exists to solve business problems and not vice versa.
There are also scenarios where the legacy systems comes out to be more efficient and does not need to be migrated.
Migration to a newer technology stack requires lot of analysis , efforts , resources ,money and it varies from company to company.
Some organisations would have resourcing challenges, some would have budget issues some would want to get the migration done with the existing resources and in that case there would be a learning curve.
The bottom line is that the leadership should be convinced about the pros and cons of migration and should foresee an increase in business and customer satisfaction for the decision in giving the go ahead for migrating a legacy system which might not be so easy.
Legacy Systems have given stable career to a lot of software professionals in big companies where there are big enterprise scale applications with hundreds and thousands of people working in the project accross different locations worldwide.
Thus legacy systems are very important for everyone and it cannot be avoided. Legacy Systems will exist and has to be maintained.
Legacy System needs Modern Minds. By modern minds we do not mean to say young people but we mean people with newer skillset,process oriented, problem solver and people who keep challenging themselves to make systems better.
What can we do ?
A software professional’s job is to continuously look for ways to improve the systems which they work on. This would only be possible by continuously learning and mastering to solve issues in whichever systems we work on.
Working on a legacy system does not mean end of career. Every new technology has evolved out as a solution on top of older technologies. No new technology would have existed without legacy systems and most software systems developed with newer technologies are bound to be legacy systems after a certain number of years of their existence.
It is all about abstraction. The older technology stack is getting abstracted with newer technologies but the fundamental building blocks are still the same.
For a technology enthusiast understanding the evolution and the fundamentals of any technology is important and it will empower them to perform good in their work with a great level of satisfaction.
Understanding the high level and low level design of a system is very important.
Also a deep understanding of modern architecture is important for them to suggest and implement newer design in legacy systems.
Look for the best practices and see if they can be incorporated in legacy code.
Analyse if new version of programming language can be used with the legacy system with minimum impact to enhance the overall maintainability of the system.
Analyse the code to remove unwanted , unused , unnecessary comments.
Run sonar scans and remove code smells , warnings etc…
Check for latest syntax uses and implement it.
See if the tight coupling can be removed and design pattern can be incorporated in the code.
All of these problems are bound to be there on code as the code exchange hands with different developers over the last few years.
Sometimes the pressure of delivery and a lack of clarity of requirements prevents us to come up with the best solution at first. There is always an opportunity to get rid of those nuances in the legacy code.
To summarize mentioned below are some of the key areas in which we can contribute to the legacy project making it maintainable and fun to work with -
- Refactoring the Code - This is all about simplifying the existing code, removing dead code, removing unwanted comments, improving readability, resolving code smells. You can also start small by improving the method design and class design and also incorporating SOLID design principle if its not properly implemented. Apply design pattern whereever applicable to improve maintainability and extendability.
- Documentation - The documentation of legacy projects are almost outdated most of the time and can be made up to date.
- Unit Testing and Automation - Look for creating or updating the unit test cases and see if anything can be automated with respect to testing or operational activities.
- Updating Dependencies - Check for the dependencies and update them if needed.
- Security - Fix the issues related to vulnerable components and apply secuirty best practices.
- Performance Optimization - This is one of the key area in which we can contribute a lot as a developer. Analyse the performance of code as well as the database objects and fix them wherever applicable.
- Caching - See if there is anything that could be cached. This would prevent unnecessary backend calls and improve the overall performance of the application.
- Enhance Logging and Monitoring - After spending some time in the project you can think of improving the overall logging and monitoring of the application. See if you can use modern way of Logging and Monitoring techniques removing the traditional log file approach. Provide visual dashboards for the logs and alerts and notification in case of failures.
Well these are only some of the points but there can be a lot of things that could be done in a leagacy project. Sometimes its code sometimes its process or operational activities that could be redesigned or improved.
These small changes in legacy systems improving the overall health of the system with gain the confidence of leadership with respect to the capability of the team and they would be able to trust and engage the current team in other challenging projects.
If you can challenge yourself in improving the legacy system you would be able to excel and work on any complicated project. Everything project has got huge learnings hidden in itself, It just depends on us to the extent we push ourselves and explore and improve the project and get satisfied with the outcome.
Conclusion
Legacy Systems are the heart of the business and sometimes the organisations. It is because of there existence new projects come to life. They are the reason of the overall health of the organisations. Legacy Systems deserve modern minds so that they can stand straight with the test of time.
By applying the techniques discussed above working in a legacy system would be fun and challenging. Right mindset and attitude is a abolute thing when we are working on legacy systems.
Thank you for reading and see you in the next post !👋
