An Agile Approach to a Legacy System

We describe how a small, successful, self-selected XP team approached a seemingly intractable problem with panache, flair and immodesty. We rewrote a legacy application by delivering new features, a radically different approach to those previously applied. This proved to be a low cost, low risk proposition with a very high payoff for success. Most importantly it provided users with new functionality quickly that could never have been retrofitted into the legacy system. In the longer term it may give a migration strategy for replacing the legacy system. 1 Background InkBlot is a large financial legacy application feeding dozens of other applications and supporting up to 100 in-house traders on a daily basis. The system was originally developed in the 1990s and the original team disbanded long ago. There are many external apps that talk directly to the database. There are no clean external interfaces, which means that we have no idea who is connecting to the system and what they are...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: XPU
• Authors: Chris Stevenson, Andy Pols
• Keywords: Legacy Application, Legacy System, Software Engineering, Stored Procedure, XPU 2004