When Does Working Software Actually Become Legacy Software?
There is a strange moment in the life of a software product when everyone agrees that it still works, yet someone starts calling it legacy. The application opens, customers can log in, transactions go through, reports are generated, and employees know exactly how to use it. There may not even be a serious performance problem.
So what changed? It is tempting to associate legacy software with age. A ten-year-old application feels old, an outdated programming language looks suspicious, and an interface that has survived several generations of design trends can make the answer seem obvious. Yet age alone tells us surprisingly little about whether software has actually become a liability.
A mature system can run for decades and remain perfectly suitable for its job. Another application can become difficult to support within a few years because the environment around it has moved faster than the software itself. A more useful...
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