Legacy Systems
Over recent months I have been asked to look at a number of legacy FoxPro system, and by legacy systems I mean systems developed BEFORE visual FoxPro 5.
All of the programs I have looked at recently have been developed using FoxPro for DOS, and what is amazing (to me anyway) is that these programs are still operating 15-20 years later and to many companies/individuals they form business critical tools.
if it ain’t broken don’t fix it?
image courtesy of There, I Fixed It
I subscribe to this philosophy, but there are times when we should invest some time, effort and money to ensure that business critical software is in a maintainable condition before it is too late.
new advances
Advances in software development have much to offer over their predecessors and what was not possible 20 years ago is standard functionality today – like emailing invoices direct to the customer, merging data from database table directly into documents, importing/exporting data into different formats…I’m sure you get the idea!
least we forget
Whilst I was dragged ‘kicking & screaming’ from DOS to the Windows environment and spent much time in self pity, I would not think of reverting back to DOS.
I still remember with some affection much from my DOS days, but there is a lot that I have forgotten, hence when trying to work out what a legacy program is doing at any particular point, it’s like trying to wade up hill through treacle – difficult and sticky.
Hence the longer a system receives no attention the more difficult it will be for someone (especially if they have no DOS experience) to fix problems or make changes when they become necessary.
This difficulty is compounded 100 fold when the program in question was developed by someone else, especially if they had failed to document/comment the code.
conclusion
Make regular assessments of all of your business critical software, make sure that you have on-going support in place in case things go wrong and most of all make lots of backups.
Like an antique, the older something gets the more difficult it will be for it to lay alongside the modern, and the harder it becomes to find a expert with the knowledge to repair them should they go wrong or need restoration and hence more costly