Dissecting the motivations, risks, and potential rewards of a software “heart transplant”
I was sketching out architectural recommendations for a client project that, after a successful POC, was ready for the prime-time of production software. I stopped to ask myself why the new arch diagram I was creating looked vastly different from the architecture of the existing concept software; even when my answers seemed solid (they included specific measures of reliability, speed, scale, and security), I could not shake the feeling that this felt familiar in a bad way. I counted the number of replatforms I have either been directly responsible for (i.e. several Modern Data Stack conversions) or indirectly impacted by (Data Warehouse reconciliations between the “old” and “new” systems) over the last fifteen years. I came up with thirteen replatforms. Of those thirteen, only four eventually yielded positive product or engineering outcomes; that is a roughly 70% failure rate among replatforms I have personally witnessed. It is no wonder that anything resembling a re-write, re-architecture, or re-thinking gives me immediate pause.
Replatforms are resource-intense, time-consuming projects that can make or break executive careers, mark the hockey stick inflection point for an organization’s growth, or leave…
