Modernization as a Forcing Function

The retirement phase of the development life cycle is frequently neglected and has significantly greater costs than just keeping a few extra systems online.  I will share some of our experience with technical debt on both hardware and software and the real costs around it. How do we decide that it’s time for something to go? How do we use the appeal of modernization to force it to go?

Outline:

The art of deprecation

• Determining ownership for abandoned items

• When a one-off product hack is a dependency

• Dependency mapping failures

• Ownership until death

Costs of end of life

• Long tail of retirement (when 10% of users don’t want something new)

• Tribal knowledge/attrition

• Reinventing the wheel

• Hardware support contracts

• Compliance issues

Modernization

• Tech maturity

• Establishing retirement dates for old when new is introduced

• Incentives for modernizing