Battlefield: Legacy Applications

# Battlefield: Legacy Applications

Let me take you on a journey of maintaining a "mission critical" legacy application, a huge refactoring, and a happy ending. We will come across pitfalls, duct tape, architectural and organizational issues. Although you'll feel a little bit dirty at the end, there won't be any SOAP.

#### Background

This talk is based on my experience of the past 18 months working with [Bulletproof](http://www.bulletproof.net) in Sydney. I inherited an Rails application that had grown from a single purpose app to the company's CRM application, under the pressure of a rapidly growing business.

As if this wasn't challenging enough, the CRM application had been built on top of another legacy Perl system that dates back more than a decade ago. Although these mostly internal applications don't experience much load, they are still very critical to Bulletproof's business.