Everything You Need To Know About Upgrading and Maintaining Delphi Legacy Projects

A legacy system is generally described as outdated computing software or hardware that is still being used by companies. While they do exactly what they are designed to perform, legacy systems often do not allow space for growth. The older technology doesn’t really interact well with the newer system. As technology advances, most of these companies that run legacy software find themselves dealing with a great number of issues, making it extremely hard to maintain.

Upgrading and Maintaining Delphi Legacy Projects

The best solution is to modernize the system. While this might sound easy, modernization is something that can’t be done overnight. In fact, most companies prefer not to upgrade the system for multiple reasons. First is the investment that the newer system requires. Companies have to shoulder expensive upgrades for a smooth and flawless migration. The fear of embracing changes is also one of the reasons that keep these companies from moving forward. The complexity of the migration can also be a reason behind the hesitation. In this video, Jim McKeeth interviews Bill Meyer, author of Delphi Legacy Projects: Strategies and Survival Guide to discuss the risks of redesigning vs. rewriting your legacy project and why some companies decided not to modernize their mainframes to the modern operating system and take advantage of modern Windows application development.

The most important thing about updating a legacy system is to protect the data that already exists. This can only be done through successful data migration. In this video, we will learn how to successfully maintain and upgrade a legacy system. It should be noted that migration is not a one-day process. For instance, there are some success migration stories including the case of the company Linx Big Farma (a retail software). The migration project of this 20-year-old company took 6 months with 22 in-house developers and 3 outsourced software contractors. It went through various stages or phases of migration from analysis, execution, and validation.

To know more about the process and the challenges of upgrading and maintaining legacy projects, feel free to explore the video below.