Morphis will be attending and exhibiting at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018 in Barcelona from November 4-8. If you’re attending the event, please look us up. You can arrange to meet with us via the Gartner Event App or simply stop by our booth. We’d be delighted to meet you and discuss how our legacy application modernisation solutions may help your business.
In doing some research for the event, I came across this story in Computer Weekly: IT woes push Sainsbury’s to £1.5bn outsource deal in which the second paragraph stated, “Sainsbury’s new chief executive, Sir Peter Davis, has pushed forward with the plans since his arrival in February, believing that the company’s ageing legacy IT systems were partly to blame for it losing its leadership of the UK supermarket sector.”
Sir Peter went to say, “The age and complexity of our current IT systems are hampering our ability to perform and develop. We spend in excess of £200m a year on our IT systems. It is essential that we get better value-for-money.”
What’s interesting is that the article is from August 2000.
Some things never change – which actually may be better stated as ‘change is the only constant’. Indeed, with the acceleration of technology, accelerating change is the norm with the attendant increases in technical debt.
There’s a great article in Hacker Noon by Dag Liodden that describes the different ways technical debt can be introduced into an application and how to manage them. It’s a super quick read but here are the headlines:
- Deliberate Technical Debt – which, paraphrasing, means you meant to take the short cut, you know you why you did it, and all that remains is to keep track of what you did.
- Accidental/Outdated Design Technical Debt – where good original design intent doesn’t deliver the performance or functionality originally intended. This type of technical debt is best corrected through refactoring.
- And then there’s what Dag wonderfully refers to as Bit Rot Technical Debt – where time and too many hands [not understanding the original design intent] combine to create a pile of doo-doo. This stinking pile often manifests itself through major system breakdowns (TSB?), security breaches and the like. A program of content refactoring, or replacement/elimination is the only remedy here.
Ensuring you don’t end up with bit rot technical debt then requires some technology components to help you manage both deliberate and accidental technical debt to prevent them becoming much worse:
- a software management system for the development process
- a software analysis system to identify application structure and original design intent
- a refactoring capability that can be integrated into the normal day-to-day operation of the software development team
- a low-code development capability that supports, for example, changes in the web application framework. Switching from HTML5 to AngularJS? Wouldn’t it be nice to use an agnostic presentation language that allows technology independence?
If you already have bit rot technical debt then, of course, Morphis can help you by taking the code and modernising to a new architecture. But, if you want access to the tools that can help prevent you getting to this point, we have you covered there too because Kuscos, Transformer, Frames and Foundations are the software management, software analysis, refactoring, re-architecting, low-code development tools that we use internally and now provide externally to help keep bit rot out of your organisation.
Come and meet us in Barcelona to learn more!
