Practical problems of Legacy Systems
Claims
We first define the readiness of the market by
analyzing some of the recurrent claims of the clients. Among the list of claims - which
is not exhaustive - some are redundant but are realities of the market. Atlantis
Technologies provides
flexible solutions and services with the aim at solving the related problems.
U
se the following points to check whether
your organization can benefit from the help of Atlantis Technologies. Not all the
problems have to be present in your organization to benefit from our solutions. Maybe
you have other problems not listed in the above set, feel free to communicate them to
us so we can update the list and help other companies that are facing the same reality.
 The development team is nearly
fully dedicated to maintenance activities
Most software lifecycle costs are due
to maintenance
The adaptations take longer and
longer
The costs related to the maintenance
activity increases
The code becomes less and less
readable
Program understanding becomes a major
maintenance activity
Time dedicated to testing activity
becomes too long
Every change asks for modifying nearly
all the application
The entire application is easily
broken when modified for any purpose
The system is not stable
The introduction of a new collaborator
is very hard
The entire knowledge of the system is
owned by few people
Communication becomes very difficult
because of lack of documentation
Budgets, plannings and resources are
hard to evaluate
It is very hard to find new
collaborators because the maintenance job is not interesting
Collaborators leave the organization
and sometimes a lot of application knowledge disappears with them
Skills become rare on the market.
Young professionals are not interested in old technologies
Decision that are often taken
Faced to the previous problems, the IT
directors must take decisions. Following are decisions that are often taken:
Entirely rewrite the applications
that take too much time to be modified/adapted or the ones which keep the most of the
resources busy
Outsource the application maintenance
Outsource the development of new applications
Delay the new applications development
Hire supplementary collaborators
Avoid any kind of interactions between applications
To do nothing at all
Rewrite from scratch the entire application
Replace as much as possible applications by packages
Consequences
Thoose decisions have obviuosely many consequences and not neglectable. They are well-known and among them are following:
The rewriting from scratch of an application implies that, during the development of the new application, the old one still exists and reflects any business change and is so forth maintained
The new application will be modified every time a business change occurs in order to keep the application up to date with the changing specifications, even though it is in the development phase
As a consequence of previous point, the time when an application is taken in maintenance is not really defined since it is already in maintenance during the development phase. Worse: the maintenance phase begins with the development phase!
The ROI when rewriting from scratch or replacing by a package is rarely reached
The project management for rewriting from scratch is very heavy
The plannings are rarely respected and the projects are often stopped
New projects can be dropped because of lack of resources
The ITC which is the support of the entire activity of the organization must operate with obsolete resources and blocks the development of the activity and so of the entire enterprise itself
Hire collaborators is expensive
The rotation of the collaborators is high because professionals don’t want to be busy with maintenance activity
Certain kind of applications ask for interactions with other applications which are in the same state
Replace an application by an ERP asks for the same effort as needed for rewriting the application from scratch and so suffers from the same kind of problems and so has the same consequeces.
Read why legacy replacement often fails.
M
any organization feel alone in this situation, convinced that
the situation is better at the opponent site. In many cases they are kept in this state
by many services companies because the outsourcing activity of maintenance or the body
shopping around maintenance is more lucrative than our alternative solutions.
Atlantis Technologies provides a
tailormade, flexible one-shot solution and services for solving most of the above
problems and as such, obviousely, also the consequeces. We attack the problem of the
legacy systems in its all, at the base, we don't try to treat the consequences.
O
nce again, we advise you to use the above highlighted points
to check whether your organization can benefit from the help of Atlantis Technologies.
Not all the problems have to be present in your organization to benefit from our
solutions. Maybe you have other problems not listed in the above set, feel free to
communicate them to us so we can update the list and help other companies that are facing
the same reality.
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