Presentation: TweetLegacy or not, must keep delivering value

After so many legacy replacement projects, it is frustrating to see that new ones seem destined to have the same future very soon. Even worse are the architectural promises of so called flexibility and delivery of value for business after number of years. The most painful of all are legacy replacement projects where business has to wait a number of years before getting any real value. My customers / users do not not care if we have legacy or not. We are building SOFTware and not concrete buildings that are someday completely replaced.

This is a story about how we deal with these issues at Port of Rotterdam while gradually replacing a large 24/7 mission critical system and a number of other similar challenges in the past: just-in-time migration approaches, event-driven achitecture, domain expertise, living with two systems at the same time, design for change and simplicity. Also when and why such solutions become too costly and how do we continually keep leveraging real value and quality of service for business.

There is a lot to say about how to keep getting profit from legacy; but what about the lessons we can learn from all the legacy pains? In contrary to common mindset, I believe we are on the wrong path in preventing this. We are trying to build systems prepared for future / unknown requirements and should deliberately be building systems that will be outdated very soon. :-)

You will hear about a number of technical approaches you might use in your current or future challenges and a different way of thinking about system design inspired or driven by Agile way of thinking.