Pack rats are running the asylum 11
Legacy systems suffer as much from Requirements Debt as design debt. People tend to not want to lose anything so “new” code meant to replace old code has the same stuff that nobody understands. Why? Because pack rats don’t want to lose anything.
I’ve done a bit of work with legacy systems. My most recent work over the past four years involved working with a group of COBOL developers and mentoring them (sometimes gently – mostly not so much) into J2EE development, which later became Spring-Hibernate based. The foreign element driving this transformation was the end of life for a mainframe. That and the difficulty of finding COBOL programmers lead to what has been called a rewrite in Java.
Four+ years later, many of the systems are rewritten and put into production. What has been one of our biggest challenges? Dealing with “requirements” that simply were not understood but maintained. Much of the legacy code ended up being ported instead of rewritten. Porting to Java you say? Yes, ported.
In my mind, taking a big block of conditional logic written in COBOL, “reverse-engineering” it to “understand” it, and then writing the same Java code is porting, not rewriting. Why all of this work? Because people did not know what the old code did but they sure didn’t want to “lose anything.”
Why didn’t we just take the time to understand what the code really meant or ask “business experts” to tell us what to do? Well, because they don’t exist, really. All the people who should be business experts know the business, but know it so well that they understand the implementation to some level of detail. Since their understanding of what the system should do is in terms of how the system currently does things, writing a new system becomes a port.
Not wanting to miss anything because it might be important (and it probably is), and not having time to figure it out, resulted in keeping a lot of code that nobody really understood. By “kept” I mean “rewrote the same logic in Java.”
So maybe Requirements Dept is a bit of a misnomer. Maybe it’s more “solution-oriented understanding” or some such thing. The bottom line, however, is that I’ve seen this again and again. It’s time to rewrite the code. Nobody really understands it or its original intent. Reverse-engineer the “meaning” from the code and infer the “what” from the “how”.
Unfortunately there’s typically many more how’s than what’s and the mapping certainly isn’t direct in any sense. So working backwards from a solution to understand what the system was supposed to do is the same as trying to move from a phenomenological view to an ontological view. That’s not something that can be solved by hard work.
Is it all doom and gloom? Of course not. But that’s for another time.
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So working backwards from a solution to understand what the system was supposed to do is the same as trying to move from a phenomenological view to an ontological view.
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