Investing in legacy system migrations has become a common business investment nowadays, allowing both mid-size businesses and large, global enterprises to remain current or — depending on how you look at it — stay ahead of the game.
Migrating your aging software is practically inevitable, but it requires the right approach in order to be holistically successful. Axis Technical Group has performed numerous migrations across various industries, and the advice we have for you will help you be successful with yours.
Like many technology endeavors and company initiatives, legacy system migrations have their own standard operating procedures and pitfalls. But if you know what they are and what to expect, you can avoid unsavory entanglements and transform those traps into opportunities that work in your favor.
In this article we will go through the DO’s and DON’Ts based on our experience working on these types of projects. Feel free to comment below if you have other recommendations of your own.
DO…
- More analysis
- Testing, testing and more testing
- Use a scientific approach
- Set both technology and organization KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators)
- Use model-driven engineering
- Have your business rules in place
- Create a road map of the things to do and the use cases of how they need to work
- Keep some of the original team that created the previous application, if possible
- Standardize your coding so everything is uniform
DON’T…
- Do it all at once
- Underestimate the size of the problem
- Leave the data migration as an afterthought
- Patch the code – fix it correctly versus covering up the problem
- Ignore the documentation steps – it will be helpful in the future
- Think it’s going to be easy
- Stress!
The Axis Technical Group Checklist
To illustrate the importance of process and excellence, below is the Axis Legacy Migration Checklist, which has worked pretty well for us and our clients:
- ENSURE you will have a data path in the end. You can reverse engineer from the legacy database to the base model.
- LEVERAGE a business analyst to create the requirements backlog that is used to describe the application’s behavior.
- DETERMINE which capabilities of the base plug-in model you want to switch on to match the application.
- CREATE the new UI and be sure to make it mobile friendly.
- GENERATE the new application in the cloud.
- ASSIGN developers to augment the target to meet all of the requirements.
- MIGRATE from the legacy application to the new cloud application.
Well, there you have it. Life should be pretty easy from this point. Or at least your impending data migration should be. If you have any questions about our processes or have an upcoming migration and need the experts to step in, don’t hesitate to contact us.
More About Axis – Axis Technical Group is a trusted business Software Developer and Business Technology Advisor to leading companies in the Mortgage, Title, Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and Financial Services industries. Our global team provides the sophisticated skill sets and resources of a global consulting firm coupled with a personal, solution-oriented approach.
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