We love the excitement of creating a brand new system, but we are also delighted to give existing software a new lease on life.
Using the same incremental and iterative approach that we bring to our new software development, we start with Roadmapping to analyze the problem and then we carefully perform application updates and legacy system integration.
Refactoring
Software entropy – the increase in complexity as a system is modified – threatens any system. Code debt or technical debt is the accumulation of poorly written code that results from hasty additions or changes made without attention to proper design principles and clean coding techniques. Technical debt and the resulting bad “code smell” isn’t just aesthetically displeasing. It indicates fragile code that is poorly performing, difficult to maintain, and hard to extend. Many legacy systems are burdened by technical debt.
A pillar of Agile development is paying down technology debt through refactoring, incrementally improving the internal workings of the code without changing its external behavior. This allows improved performance without breaking operational continuity. We will clean up your code to make it faster, more stable and scalable.
Modernizing
Sometimes refactoring can be done on an existing code base, but in the case of many legacy systems it makes sense to incrementally replace or enhance the existing code by introducing components written with newer tools. Retooling the system creates opportunities to replace outdated features and add new ones. Some features, such as mobile or even web access, may have been unavailable when the original systems were created. We may also recommend repartitioning or replacing the database to improve accessibility, efficiency, and security.
Integrating
In some cases an existing application is perfectly adequate, but it needs to communicate with new software. We will respectfully integrate legacy systems by building new interfaces that make tried-and-true features available in new contexts.
Testing
Whether we are creating brand new systems or overhauling existing ones, we rely on testing – unit testing, integration testing, and application stress testing – to make sure we deliver well-working, efficient code that can stand up to real world traffic.