We’re living in the digital era where everything is digital around us, and as our digital world continues evolving, your legacy apps must follow suit. Today, consumers are tech-savvy and demand innovative and advanced services, which forces businesses to undergo digital transformations of their systems and legacy apps. Therefore, it is essential to include plans for Fail-proof modernization of your legacy apps when you’re adopting a digital transformation strategy.
The critical point here is that app modernization must be a process that needs to be more than updating and replacing outdated technologies. The modernization of apps involves transforming, re-hosting, re-imagining, and re-engineering older and outdated apps into modern and newer apps. However, before you initiate the app modernization process, you should consider some crucial keys.
As Enzo Torresi puts it aptly:
“God created the world in seven days because God didn’t have to worry about legacy.”
Unfortunately, enterprise customers don’t have the same luxury. They are dealing with legacy in varying degrees of scale and complexity. This article presents the eight keys organizations must adopt in a complex (legacy) Fail-proof app modernization program. Let’s look at them in detail:
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1. Expenditure Review
Fail-proof legacy app modernization isn’t a straightforward task. Therefore, organizations must perform an in-depth expenditure analysis. That will help ensure your app modernization process is profitable in the future. The following costs of app modernization must be assessed:
- ROI Analysis:
To assess your company’s current situation, you must calculate the return on investment (ROI) to make appropriate decisions.
- Infrastructure Cost Analysis:
Calculate and evaluate the costs of IT infrastructure, which will help outline how much you can spend on your organization’s IT infrastructure.
- Maintenance Cost Analysis:
Use a Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) to calculate your spending on maintenance and estimate the infrastructure’s maintenance costs.
2. Compliance and Integration
You must look into two aspects – compliance and integration before modernizing your legacy apps. You may depend on third-party APIs like data transfer, user verification, and geo-location for your apps.
Modernized apps come with integration functionality built-in. However, before you modernize the software, you must ascertain that all third-party tools are compatible with your apps. You must also ensure that there won’t be any issues with compliance for your modern app.
3. Existing Budgetary Resources
It’s critical to have a well-thought-out fiscal plan in action for Fail-proof app modernization. You must ask yourself the question – What budgetary constraints need to be considered before app modernization? The bottom line is that you must have sufficient funds for allocation in the app modernization process in your budget.
4. Risk Factors
All organizations must take into account the risk factors connected with app modernization. In cases where you modernize multiple applications together, you must assess time requirements for individually upgrading every app.
Also, when there are numerous lines of code, you must take extra care when handling the code. Apart from that, it would be best to consider what operational risks could arise during the app modernization process.
5. Data Management Constraints
Implementing Fail-proof app modernization can be complicated because legacy apps encompass a remarkable amount of data. First, you must take a long and hard look at the underlying data and then use it in an actionable way.
You must formulate tactical data governance rules to manage data in a better way. It will help you eliminate data silos, making it easier to optimize storage space and reorganize data.
6. Time Optimization
You need patience and time for Fail-proof app modernization. Every organization has various app modernization processes and the required time for this modernization. However, to implement the modernization strategy, organizations must have enough time.
Fail-proof app modernization doesn’t happen in a moment, as it’s a journey that will take time. There’s no theoretical timeline for modernization, which is why you must take a substantial amount of time to modernize your app so that you can reap the benefits of Fail-proof app modernization.
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7. Invest in Automated Reverse Engineering of Legacy Systems
The biggest challenge in most modernization programs is to gain a functional understanding of the apps that will be modernized. The problem is compounded by the non-availability of application SMEs and inadequate documentation of legacy systems. The overall delivery effort is increased by nearly 40% because you must analyze thousands of codes and identify functional specifications for the application.
It takes months to understand the interfaces, codebase, and call graphs before any attempts to change the underlying code. Investing in scanning tools for the legacy code base will help extract the functional specifications and produce outputs such as call graph, business rules between UML models, application components, sequence diagrams, mapping of UI to database entities, etc. That’s when NLP, AI, and ML are useful for app modernization.
Automating reverse engineering of legacy systems will help optimize the SME time for information discovery or poring over the source code for functional understanding. Instead, the SME time can be best leveraged validating the findings and providing clarifications on the behavior of the legacy system. Therefore, the modernization efforts can reduce by 25% to 40%, which positively impacts the time to market.
8. Avoid Foundation Fatigue
Studies have found that around 4 to 6 agile sprints are required to set up the foundation for setting up API gateways, developer tools and utilities, DevSecOps pipelines, Service Mesh, infrastructure provisioning, agile project management and issue tracking solutions, logging, and monitoring solutions. That causes foundation fatigue as developers aren’t productive in this phase.
The time it takes to write the first line of code is indirectly proportional to the chances of successfully delivering the program. Codifying the foundational activities into a ‘developer application platform’ vastly improves time to market because of the quick onboarding of development teams. It improves the software quality due to the standardization of development practices across the board.
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Conclusion for Fail-proof App Modernization
In today’s high-tech world, legacy app modernization isn’t a choice but a necessity. Therefore, the right time for organizations to implement digital transformations of their legacy applications is now. If you’re interested in accelerating your journey for app modernization and want Fail-proof app modernization, get in touch with us.
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