14.13. Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns

How can we address the problem of legacy software?

Grady: The phrase I often use is that while the code is the truth, it's not the whole truth: there is a loss of information from vision to execution. My experience is that there are nine things you can do with old software: abandon it, give it away, ignore it, put it on life support, rewrite it, harvest from it, wrap it up, transform it, or preserve it. Each of these things has both technical as well as social elements. From a technical perspective, there's interesting research underway to harvest patterns from code; from a social perspective, the techniques of oral histories can contribute to a solution.