Re:How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite
by ams6110 on Monday April 08, 2013 @10:07PM
(#5516056)
We have a pattern we call shrink ray. It's a graph of how much the old system is still in place.
Immediately brought to mind the first large shop I worked in out of school (about 1992) where they had a big chart on one wall titled "Punch Card Elimination" with a downward trending line. I was actually shocked that a large, multinational manufacturer was using punch cards for anything, particularly when my project involved building cutting-edge (at the time) client/server systems that included wireless handheld devices on the client side. My introduction to the counterintuitive world of enterprise IT: you will often see opposite ends of the technology spectrum in use, simply because the value proposition of eliminating the old was never high enough before.
Immediately brought to mind the first large shop I worked in out of school (about 1992) where they had a big chart on one wall titled "Punch Card Elimination" with a downward trending line. I was actually shocked that a large, multinational manufacturer was using punch cards for anything, particularly when my project involved building cutting-edge (at the time) client/server systems that included wireless handheld devices on the client side. My introduction to the counterintuitive world of enterprise IT: you will often see opposite ends of the technology spectrum in use, simply because the value proposition of eliminating the old was never high enough before.