In
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...
, a legacy system is an old method, technology,
computer system
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These prog ...
, or
application program
Application may refer to:
Mathematics and computing
* Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks
** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...
, "of, relating to, or being a previous or outdated computer system", yet still in use. Often referencing a system as "legacy" means that it paved the way for the standards that would follow it. This can also imply that the system is out of date or in need of replacement.
Legacy code is old computer
source code that is no longer supported on the standard hardware and environments, and is a codebase that is in some respect
obsolete or supporting something obsolete. Legacy code may be written in programming languages, use
frameworks and external libraries, or use
architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...
and patterns that are no longer considered modern, increasing the mental burden and ramp-up time for software engineers who work on the codebase. Legacy code may have zero or insufficient
automated tests, making
refactoring dangerous and likely to introduce
bugs. Long-lived code is susceptible to
software rot, where changes to the runtime environment, or surrounding software or hardware may require maintenance or emulation of some kind to keep working. Legacy code may be present to support legacy hardware, a separate legacy system, or a legacy customer using an old feature or software version.
While the term usually refers to source code, it can also apply to
executable code that no longer runs on a later version of a system, or requires a
compatibility layer to do so. An example would be a classic
Macintosh application which will not run natively on
macOS, but runs inside the
Classic environment
This is a list of macOS built-in apps and system components.
Applications
App Store
The Mac App Store is macOS's digital distribution platform for macOS apps, created and maintained by Apple Inc. based on the iOS version, the platform was an ...
, or a
Win16
The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. The name Windows API collectively refers to several different platform implementations th ...
application running on
Windows XP using the
Windows on Windows feature in XP.
An example of legacy hardware are
legacy ports like PS/2 and VGA ports, and CPUs with older, incompatible
instruction sets (with e.g. newer operating systems). Examples in legacy software include legacy file formats like
.swf
SWF ( ) is an Adobe Flash file format used for multimedia, vector graphics and ActionScript.[Open Screen P ...](_blank)
for
Adobe Shockwave
Adobe Shockwave (formerly Macromedia Shockwave and MacroMind Shockwave) is a discontinued multimedia platform for building interactive multimedia applications and video games. Developers originate content using Adobe Director and publish it on ...
or .123 for
Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles i ...
, and text files encoded with legacy
character encodings like
EBCDIC
Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC; ) is an eight- bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding ...
.
Overview
The first use of the term ''legacy'' to describe computer systems probably occurred in the 1960s. By the 1980s it was commonly used to refer to existing computer systems to distinguish them from the design and implementation of new systems. Legacy was often heard during a conversion process, for example, when moving data from the legacy system to a new database.
While this term may indicate that some engineers may feel that a system is out of date, a legacy system can continue to be used for a variety of reasons. It may simply be that the system still provides for the users' needs. In addition, the decision to keep an old system may be influenced by economic reasons such as
return on investment challenges or
vendor lock-in, the inherent challenges of
change management, or a variety of other reasons other than functionality.
Backward compatibility
Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especiall ...
(such as the ability of newer systems to handle legacy
file formats and
character encodings) is a goal that
software developers often include in their work.
Even if it is no longer used, a legacy system may continue to impact the organization due to its historical role. Historic data may not have been converted into the new system format and may exist within the new system with the use of a customized
schema crosswalk, or may exist only in a
data warehouse
In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integra ...
. In either case, the effect on
business intelligence and
operational reporting can be significant. A legacy system may include procedures or terminology which are no longer relevant in the current context, and may hinder or confuse understanding of the methods or technologies used.
Organizations can have compelling reasons for keeping a legacy system, such as:
* The system works satisfactorily, and the owner sees no reason to change it.
* The costs of redesigning or replacing the system are prohibitive because it is large,
monolithic, and/or complex.
* Retraining on a new system would be costly in lost time and money, compared to the anticipated appreciable benefits of replacing it (which may be zero).
* The system requires near-constant
availability
In reliability engineering, the term availability has the following meanings:
* The degree to which a system, subsystem or equipment is in a specified operable and committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is called for at ...
, so it cannot be taken out of service, and the cost of designing a new system with a similar availability level is high. Examples include systems to handle customers' accounts in
banks,
computer reservations system Computer reservation systems, or central reservation systems (CRS), are computerized systems used to store and retrieve information and conduct transactions related to air travel, hotels, car rental, or other activities. Originally designed and ope ...
s,
air traffic control, energy distribution (
power grids),
nuclear power plants, military defense installations, and systems such as the
TOPS database.
* The way that the system works is not well understood. Such a situation can occur when the designers of the system have left the organization, and the system has either not been fully documented or documentation has been lost.
* The user expects that the system can easily be replaced when this becomes necessary.
* Newer systems perform undesirable (especially for individual or non-institutional users) secondary functions such as ''a'') tracking and reporting of user activity and/or ''b'') automatic updating that creates "
back-door" security vulnerabilities and leaves end users dependent on the good faith and honesty of the vendor providing the updates. This problem is especially acute when these secondary functions of a newer system cannot be disabled.
Problems posed by legacy computing
Legacy systems are considered to be potentially problematic by some software engineers for several reasons.
* If legacy
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
runs on only antiquated
hardware, the cost of maintaining the system may eventually outweigh the cost of replacing both the software and hardware unless some form of
emulation
Emulation may refer to:
*Emulation (computing), imitation of behavior of a computer or other electronic system with the help of another type of system
:*Video game console emulator, software which emulates video game consoles
*Gaussian process em ...
or
backward compatibility
Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especiall ...
allows the software to run on new hardware.
* These systems can be hard to maintain, improve, and expand because there is a general lack of understanding of the system; the staff who were experts on it have retired or forgotten what they knew about it, and staff who entered the field after it became "legacy" never learned about it in the first place. This can be worsened by lack or loss of documentation.
Comair airline company fired its CEO in 2004 due to the failure of an antiquated legacy crew scheduling system that ran into a limitation not known to anyone in the company.
* Legacy systems may have vulnerabilities in older operating systems or applications due to lack of security patches being available or applied. There can also be production configurations that cause security problems. These issues can put the legacy system at risk of being compromised by attackers or knowledgeable insiders.
* Integration with newer systems may also be difficult because new software may use completely different technologies. Integration across technology is quite common in computing, but integration between newer technologies and substantially older ones is not common. There may simply not be sufficient demand for integration technology to be developed. Some of this "glue" code is occasionally developed by vendors and enthusiasts of particular legacy technologies.
* Budgetary constraints often lead corporations to not address the need of replacement or migration of a legacy system. However, companies often don't consider the increasing supportability costs (people, software and hardware, all mentioned above) and do not take into consideration the enormous loss of capability or business continuity if the legacy system were to fail. Once these considerations are well understood, then based on the proven ROI of a new, more secure, updated technology stack platform is not as costly as the alternative—and the budget is found.
* Due to the fact that most legacy programmers are entering retirement age and the number of young engineers replacing them is very small, there is an alarming shortage of available workforce. This in turn results in difficulty in maintaining legacy systems, as well as an increase in costs of procuring experienced programmers.
* Some legacy systems have a hard limit on their total capacity which may not be enough for today's needs, for example the 4 GB memory limit on many older
x86
x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...
CPUs, or the
4 billion address limit in
IPv4.
Improvements on legacy software systems
Where it is impossible to replace legacy systems through the practice of
application retirement, it is still possible to enhance (or "re-face") them. Most development often goes into adding new interfaces to a legacy system. The most prominent technique is to provide a Web-based interface to a terminal-based mainframe application. This may reduce staff productivity due to slower response times and slower mouse-based operator actions, yet it is often seen as an "upgrade", because the interface style is familiar to unskilled users and is easy for them to use. John McCormick discusses such strategies that involve
middleware.
Printing improvements are problematic because legacy software systems often add no formatting instructions, or they use protocols that are not usable in modern PC/Windows printers. A print server can be used to intercept the data and translate it to a more modern code.
Rich Text Format (RTF) or
PostScript documents may be created in the legacy application and then interpreted at a PC before being printed.
Biometric security measures are difficult to implement on legacy systems. A workable solution is to use a
Telnet or
HTTP proxy server
In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource.
Instead of connecting directly to a server that can fulfill a reques ...
to sit between users and the mainframe to implement secure access to the legacy application.
The change being undertaken in some organizations is to switch to
automated business process (ABP) software which generates complete systems. These systems can then interface to the organizations' legacy systems and use them as
data repositories. This approach can provide a number of significant benefits: the users are insulated from the inefficiencies of their legacy systems, and the changes can be incorporated quickly and easily in the ABP software.
Model-driven reverse and
forward engineering approaches can be also used for the improvement of legacy software.
NASA example
Andreas Hein, from the Technical University of Munich, researched the use of legacy systems in space exploration. According to Hein, legacy systems are attractive for reuse if an organization has the capabilities for verification, validation, testing, and operational history. These capabilities must be integrated into various software life cycle phases such as development, implementation, usage, or maintenance. For software systems, the capability to use and maintain the system are crucial. Otherwise the system will become less and less understandable and maintainable.
According to Hein, verification, validation, testing, and operational history increases the confidence in a system's reliability and quality. However, accumulating this history is often expensive. NASA's now retired
Space Shuttle program used a large amount of 1970s-era technology. Replacement was cost-prohibitive because of the expensive requirement for flight certification. The original hardware completed the expensive integration and certification requirement for flight, but any new equipment would have had to go through that entire process again. This long and detailed process required extensive tests of the new components in their new configurations before a single unit could be used in the Space Shuttle program. Thus any new system that started the certification process becomes a ''
de facto
''De facto'' ( ; , "in fact") describes practices that exist in reality, whether or not they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms. It is commonly used to refer to what happens in practice, in contrast with ''de jure'' ("by la ...
'' legacy system by the time it is approved for flight.
Additionally, the entire Space Shuttle system, including ground and launch vehicle assets, was designed to work together as a closed system. Since the specifications did not change, all of the certified systems and components performed well in the roles for which they were designed. Even before the Shuttle was scheduled to be retired in 2010, NASA found it advantageous to keep using many pieces of 1970s technology rather than to upgrade those systems and recertify the new components.
Perspectives on legacy code
Some in the
software engineering prefer to describe "legacy code" without the connotation of being obsolete. Among the most prevalent neutral conceptions are ''source code inherited from someone else'' and ''source code inherited from an older version of the software''. Eli Lopian, CEO of Typemock, has defined it as "code that developers are afraid to change". Michael Feathers introduced a definition of ''legacy code'' as ''code without tests'', which reflects the perspective of legacy code being difficult to work with in part due to a lack of
automated
Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines ...
regression tests. He also defined
characterization tests to start putting ''legacy code'' under test.
Ginny Hendry characterized creation of code as a `challenge` to current coders to create code that is "like other legacies in our lives—like the antiques, heirlooms, and stories that are cherished and lovingly passed down from one generation to the next. What if legacy code was something we took pride in?".
Additional uses of the term ''Legacy'' in computing
The term ''legacy support'' is often used in conjunction with legacy systems. The term may refer to a feature of modern software. For example,
Operating systems with "legacy support" can detect and use older hardware. The term may also be used to refer to a business function; e.g. a software or hardware vendor that is supporting, or providing
software maintenance, for older products.
A "legacy" product may be a product that is no longer sold, has lost substantial market share, or is a version of a product that is not current. A legacy product may have some advantage over a modern product making it appealing for customers to keep it around. A product is only truly "obsolete" if it has
an advantage to nobody—if no person making a rational decision would choose to acquire it new.
The term "legacy mode" often refers specifically to
backward compatibility
Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especiall ...
. A software product that is capable of performing as though it were a previous version of itself, is said to be "running in legacy mode". This kind of feature is common in operating systems and internet browsers, where many applications depend on these underlying components.
The
computer mainframe era saw many applications running in legacy mode. In the modern business computing environment,
n-tier
In software engineering, multitier architecture (often referred to as ''n''-tier architecture) is a client–server architecture in which presentation, application processing and data management functions are physically separated. The most wide ...
, or
3-tier architectures
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings o ...
are more difficult to place into legacy mode as they include many components making up a single system.
Virtualization technology is a recent innovation allowing legacy systems to continue to operate on modern hardware by running older operating systems and browsers on a software system that emulates legacy hardware.
Brownfield architecture
Programmers have borrowed the term
''brownfield'' from the construction industry, where previously developed land (often polluted and abandoned) is described as ''brownfield''.
* ''Brownfield architecture'' is a type of software or network architecture that incorporates legacy systems.
* ''Brownfield deployment'' is an upgrade or addition to an existing software or network architecture that retains legacy components.
Alternative view
There is an alternate favorable opinion—growing since the end of the Dotcom bubble in 1999—that legacy systems are simply computer systems in working use:
IT analysts estimate that the cost of replacing
business logic In computer software, business logic or domain logic is the part of the program that encodes the real-world business rules that determine how data can be created, stored, and changed. It is contrasted with the remainder of the software that might ...
is about five times that of reuse, even discounting the risk of system failures and security breaches. Ideally, businesses would never have to
rewrite most core business logic: ''debits = credits'' is a perennial requirement.
The IT industry is responding with "legacy modernization" and "legacy transformation": refurbishing existing business logic with new user interfaces, sometimes using
screen scraping and service-enabled access through
web services. These techniques allow organizations to understand their existing code assets (using discovery tools), provide new user and application interfaces to existing code, improve workflow, contain costs, minimize risk, and enjoy classic qualities of service (near 100% uptime, security, scalability, etc.).
This trend also invites reflection on what makes legacy systems so durable. Technologists are relearning the importance of sound
architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...
from the start, to avoid costly and risky rewrites. The most common legacy systems tend to be those which embraced well-known IT architectural principles, with careful planning and strict methodology during implementation. Poorly designed systems often don't last, both because they wear out and because their inherent faults invite replacement. Thus, many organizations are rediscovering the value of both their legacy systems and the theoretical underpinnings of those systems.
See also
*
Application retirement
*
Software rot
*
Data migration
Data migration is the process of selecting, preparing, extracting, and transforming data and permanently transferring it from one computer storage system to another. Additionally, the validation of migrated data for completeness and the decommis ...
*
Deprecation
*
Digital dark age
*
Legacy encoding
*
Legacy-free PC
*
Legacy port
*
Software archaeology
*
Software brittleness
*
Software entropy
Software entropy is the idea that software eventually rots as it is changed if sufficient care is not taken to maintain coherence with product design and established design principles. The common usage is only tangentially related to entropy as de ...
*
Stovepipe system In engineering and computing, "stovepipe system" is a pejorative term for a system that has the potential to share data or functionality with other systems but which does not do so. The term evokes the image of stovepipes rising above buildings, eac ...
References
Further reading
A.M. Hein, How to Assess Heritage Systems in the Early Phases?SECESA 2014, 08-10 October 2014, University of Stuttgart Germany
by Danny Budzinski, ''Control Design Magazine'', January 2011
by Stephanie Overby, ''CIO Magazine'', May 1, 2005
by Adam N. Rosenberg
*
*
"The Danger of Legacy Systems"by Steve R. Smith, May 3, 2011.
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Legacy System
System
Technological change