By Charles Araujo
Peer inside the modern IT organization, and it can be a bit like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where the character furiously switches between two opposite personas (but hopefully without the confrontational part).
On one hand, you have excitement about DevOps, continuous delivery, and the entire idea of rapid and iterative development.
But when it comes to legacy environments, it’s as if IT becomes a completely different organization—even when the same people are involved. Gone are the fast-moving, iterative approaches, and DevOps. The traditional project-oriented waterfall methodology returns.
This fallback is particularly evident when it comes to the granddaddy of legacy projects: modernization.
Progressive organizations are realizing that skipping DevOps during modernization efforts is a missed opportunity and are starting to buck the waterfall and legacy trend. But as they do so, they are finding that DevOps and legacy modernization can be a tough fit.
Part of the challenge is cultural and founded in the way that organizations and IT leaders have typically looked at modernization efforts. Jason Bloomberg, president of Intellyx, discussed these factors at length in two previous articles, one of which was Modernization: The Old Way and the New Way.
The architecture of legacy environments and their rigid structural elements are often what push organizations into a waterfall mentality in the first place. Applying Agile and DevOps principles is difficult when the rigidity of an environment makes it onerous to break it into movable pieces.
