Book
Kill It with Fire
Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)
Marianne Bellotti
Summary
A book about deciding when and how to modernize an aging computer system, written against the reflex in its title. Bellotti argues that tearing a legacy system down and rebuilding it often consumes time and money and ends in a less efficient result, and that newer is not always better. Among its ten chapters are ones on how to evaluate an architecture, why modernization is hard, building and protecting a project's momentum, joining an effort that is already under way, breaking changes, and knowing when a project is finished; the last chapter is on future-proofing. The material comes with case studies and anecdotes from her own work, which the publisher's biography places at the United States Digital Service and the United Nations.
Target Readers
- Engineers and technical leaders responsible for a legacy system that their organization wants to replace
- Managers who have to judge whether a migration will add value before investing in it
Tags
Colophon
- Publisher
- No Starch Press
- ISBN
- 978-1-7185-0118-8
- Published
- Mar 2021
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Prerequisites
- Recommended
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Michael C. Feathers
Reason: Working Effectively with Legacy Code covers the techniques for getting untested code under test by finding seams, and changing it safely. Kill It with Fire works at the level outside that: whether an aging system should be rebuilt at all, whether a migration will add value, and how to tell when a project is finished, argued through case studies. Read with the code-level techniques already in hand, its alternatives to a rewrite are easier to picture concretely.
Next Books
- Recommended
Architecture Modernization
Socio-technical alignment of software, strategy, and structure
Nick Tune, Jean-Georges Perrin
Reason: Kill It with Fire concentrates on judgment: whether to modernize, where maintenance effort pays off, and how to keep an effort's momentum. Architecture Modernization treats modernization as a socio-technical problem and supplies methods for carrying it out, from finding out what the business is trying to achieve through Wardley Mapping and EventStorming to identifying domains and subdomains. The first book settles whether to do it; the second provides tools for doing it.