9 Software Modernization Traps to Look Out for While Revamping Your Business

Quick Summary: Legacy Software Modernization is the need of the hour, and running businesses have realized this nearly. This blog is a rundown of the most common software modernization traps that companies usually become prey to and well-founded solutions to navigate the same. You will also find real-life examples of pitfalls of software modernization from the conventional to the modernized front. Quickly look at how Radixweb could be your ideal partner in offering the best software modernization.

Ever watched “Dream Home Maker” on Netflix? Wondered how tricky and cumbersome it could be to renovate your old home to get a newly fangled one! Well, legacy software modernization is the same task, but with the software. Software development is touching new heights of advancements with each passing day, making the old or existing software obsolete for sustaining oneself in the highly competitive market.

As per one of the industry analyses by Markets and Markets, the application modernization services market is bound to propel at a CAGR of 16.7% by the end of 2027. The driving force behind such progressive statistics is the rise in advanced cloud-native technologies and automation. Additionally, such growth can be attributed to the growing importance of quality enablers, vertical-industry-specific assets, and service delivery accelerators.

Given this, businesses are increasingly approaching legacy software modernization company as their strategic partners to navigate the drawbacks of their conventional systems and maintain their position at the top of their charts.

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The Rudiments of Software Product Modernization Traps

Software product modernization means transforming your organization’s legacy IT infrastructure, solutions, and architecture with the most advanced technologies and models. With it, you can avail yourself of the advantages of reduced time-to-market, continuous software maintenance and support, early defects identification, faster product releases, and automated software delivery.

But with the advancements in technology, many software modernization traps are rising. Some blindly follow the trend only to get nowhere in the end, and some have an ill-defined focus. If not addressed, these traps could lead to a massive system failure, causing a loss of money, motivation, and effort. Let’s understand these traps in detail in the following section.

What are the Traps in Software Modernization?

When climbing up the hill, the venturer often faces a lot of trouble. Similarly, upgrading your software systems to the most-contemporary ones has traps and pitfalls on its way up. Here is a list of such traps in software modernization and their relevant solutions -

1. Delaying the Process

The very first trap is assuming that the legacy systems would work fine, until they batter down into loss-making units. Software modernization is about doing the proper survey of the existing systems, locating their drawbacks, and taking meaningful and prompt decisions to upgrade such systems.

Delaying the process could lead you towards financial losses, with no scope to make an investment in software modernization. So, simply avoid yourself from falling into the “FEAR” or “PROCRASTINATION” trap, and head straight towards modernizing your existing systems.

2. Blindly Following the Trend

Many organizations make impulsive decisions to undertake software modernization because many in the market are doing that or because the trend is going that way. But such action could backfire on you. Instead, you must start with architecture and code auditing to gain a better understanding of your existing software systems, followed by choosing the right strategy for modernizing legacy applications.

While blindly following the trend would do you no good, relying on facts and figures would allow you to take logical steps towards software modernization solutions. Hence, enabling you to optimize your performance, compliance, security, and efficiency.

3. Being Excessively Agile

Agile is a buzzword in the IT industry, and no one, right from the C-Suite executives to developers can get over it. This could likely be one of the major software modernization obstacles. As per a basic life rule, everything is good till the time it is taken in moderation. The same is the case here.

Prioritize only agile, and you will lose focus of your end goal. This is because agile would create superfluous chaos at each software project stage, leading you to technical hell. So, it’s better to hire software developers to balance agile with proper and timely implementation of the ideas.

4. Skipping the Planning Part

When you skip the planning part of software modernization, it is bound to bring a lot many obstacles down your way. Always remember that upgrading or transforming the software systems is not a major task, as is doing such upgradation in alignment with the business objectives.

If software modernization is not in symmetry with the business goals and vision, it is most likely that you won’t receive the desired results even with the best of software on the board. So, understand planning to be a crucial element of software modernization, without which its success is not possible.

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5. Ill-Defined Focal Point

Don’t ever lose yourself in the jaws of blurred focus. For software modernization to be successful, it is necessary to rightly define your focus area. Without a focal point on board, you are prone to making unscripted decisions that might result in mismanagement, time inefficiency, and further losses.

A well-defined focal point will need you to understand different reengineering and architectural aspects. It will help you systematically proceed with your software modernization journey, complete it in a timely manner, prevent any hasty decisions, and offer desired results at the end of it all.

6. Sidelining the Team

Legacy software modernization is a big step for any organization and to be successfully accomplished, it would need the cooperation of all team members. Don’t force your team to jump to the new systems; rather communicate effectively and give them confidence that they could perform better with modernized systems.

Keep them well-informed about what changes you plan to make and share the required legacy application modernization guide and emails informing them of the same. You can also conduct team meetings to communicate the major software changes and working system modifications.

7. Misconstruing Software Testing

This is a very popular software modernization risk that can be countered by logically valuing the software testing process. Organizations intentionally skip out of the software testing part, either to save money, lack of patience, overconfidence, or simply underestimate the worth of it.

Misconstruing software testing could bring you obstacles at some later stage, posing a problem at the roll-out stage. Hence, it’s better to undertake proper software testing and maintain an effective stance of calibration and accuracy.

8. Undermining the Data Influence

Companies that undermine the impact of data make their situations worse. While emphasizing code and functionality is a must, priority on data structure is inevitable. Avoiding the data structures can pop up code complexities, making change implementation more stressful.

While appropriate data structures and their restructuring can bring you better performance and enhance your existing code. So, do not underestimate the impact that ideal data structures can have on your software modernization strategy, and proceed accordingly.

9. Trivializing Re-Engineering

It would be a big mistake if you misunderstand re-engineering as just writing a piece of code. No, it is not simply that! It is a vast subject comprising a series of tasks, detailed guidance to each step, and ultimate integration. It requires an eagle-eye-view approach to weave in the numerous processes and software products across the entire project.

The best you can do to achieve the finest of re-engineering is to join hands with a seasoned legacy modernization services provider that could direct and steer your venture at each point, bringing success and growth to your organization.

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Stay Aware of These 3 Software Modernization Challenges

By this point, you know the significant part of software modernization. You know about the software modernization traps and ways to avoid software modernization project setbacks. Now, it’s time to see the software modernization challenges that you may face while implementing it and how to overcome them -

Dearth of IT Skilled Personnel

Staff with relevant IT skills are necessary for software modernization, given the complex working on mainframe architecture and its components. Developers are so occupied with their tasks that they have no idea or time to analyze the application and its working.

This requires hiring a dedicated software development team for the newly modernized application, which could further lead to increased budgeted costs and intricacies. Additionally, there are challenges related to lost patched source code and outdated documentation.

The best way to encounter this challenge is to associate with the application modernization services vendor who could source you the required IT skilled staff at your time and cost. Other ways could be to hire the required staff from labor pools, train the staff, or partner with educational institutions and increase college placements.

The Rigidity of Legacy Ecosystem

Legacy ecosystems mean a network of software and systems working in tandem with each other in a specific way for a long time. This could include a variety of databases, protocols, file formats, and programming languages that the organizational staff is used to working with.

Software modernization services may change a part of this legacy ecosystem or even the entire one. This could lead to chaos and reluctance amongst the team members. Additionally, if not implemented in a systematic manner, it could lead to several issues hampering the business.

The finest solution to this problem is undergoing modernization step-by-step. Plan, Prioritize, Prepare, and Implement should be your motto to generate high ROI with app modernization. This would enable a smooth and seamless implementation of the software product modernization, while also giving enough time to your employees to adjust to the change.

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Data Migration Overload

Software modernization requires data migration as its primary operation. The data stored in any legacy application could be a heavy load, counting in terabytes or petabytes. Given such a substantial amount, this could be difficult to migrate to and may lead to blunders such as data loss.

To mitigate such challenges in software modernization projects, businesses usually look over the best practices for software modernization and focus on the main success drivers, including scalability, productivity, and simplicity.

To solve this challenge, employ ETL plugins that effectively shift data from one point to the other in a simple manner. Also, a proper infrastructure is inevitable for legacy system files with data in non-contemporary encoding.

A Quick Glimpse on the Top Software Modernization Projects

There are a lot of successful software modernization projects that you can have for your inspiration here -

1. Goldman Sachs: It is one of the biggest financial corporates across the globe that implemented software modernization with the aim of simplifying its toolchain, which slowed down their deployment cycles.
2. Equinix: It is one of the popular names in the global data center. They took up software modernization to enable better scalability and enterprise control, without compromising on quality.
3. Shopify: It is one of the largest e-commerce platforms that faced the fallout of nearly 3 million lines of code. With software modernization, it is able to add as many features as required with comparatively a smaller number of breaks.
4. QuickBooks: It adopted software modernization several times since its foundation in 1983 to be at the top position in the accounting software market in the USA.

These software modernization examples are live proof that software modernization, if implemented in a streamlined and logical manner, induces the desired results.

Radixweb as Your Ally for Legacy Software ModernizationRapid IT advancements are making legacy products obsolete. Legacy software is becoming more costly to acquire and maintain and needs to be revised in terms of performance.While this is a challenge for many organizations, the market has started embracing the option of legacy software modernization. This approach is known for its benefits, like better scalability, cost-effectiveness, timely delivery, and high performance. But there are certain traps and challenges that you may encounter.And to navigate such traps and challenges, you can always partner with Radixweb. Our experts help your business migrate your legacy software systems through architectural transformation and utilize the latest technologies for software reengineering. We ensure your business is not at risk of security breaches or downtime due to outdated software.Contact us now and kickstart your software modernization journey.