Tips to Inherit and Maintain Legacy Code

Tips to inherit and maintain Legacy Code

For working professionals, each day is a broken up normal hog day – coming into the office, taking on the current project and picking the subsequent  job of the customer section with the utmost importance.  With full dedication and motivation working professionals start the proceedings of implementing the tasks. However, with a lot of code involved it is difficult to grasp the code completely. It needs to be understood, evaluated and placed into perspective with the feature you are executing. To get the best outcome you start depicting a system plan of the proceedings and start taking the help of the team members to understand the code. On the other hand, the further you plunge into it the more puzzling it changes to. This situation arises once at least when there is no other option than breaking the code to get things moving. And then the enthusiasm comes back and as a final point, you get the job completed and the feature you are working on is all set to be validated in the course of the evaluation. But it is not necessary that things will fall into place every time, as a lot of software products will have at least one codebase that developers avoid as they are scared of breaking it.  At times it becomes too difficult to implement new features as it breaks current code due to a huge factually developed code base. Neither this base is well organized, nor fresh and open. As the reliable schedules of feature implementation cannot be given, planning becomes impossible, and the project threat becomes uncontainable. And in a short time, the team becomes upset of working with this legacy code.

How to repair it in this situation then? Before moving ahead, let us understand that what is legacy code?

Legacy Migration

Legacy Code explained and why it is needed

Legacy code is referred to code that is inherited by a software programmer from another source be it internal or external. It is mostly considered to be a thing of the past. It also denotes an application structure source code form that is no longer sustained. Legacy code can also refer to unsupported operating systems, hardware and formats. On the whole, legacy code is transformed to a recent software language and podium. Sometimes software developers do not want to touch the legacy code because of the risk factor involved with it. However, legacy code is needed for a lot of reasons – when there is a need to add a new feature or for fixing a new bug. Also, sometimes there is a need of improving the plan or improving the code owing to present alterations, as explained in the diagram shown below:

Factors affecting the legacy code and things to be taken care of while changing the code

When working with legacy code, to develop the required fresh structures, the factors which influence it the most are idea, threat and time. Despite the fact that alterations are essential in the legacy code, one thing which should be kept in mind is that the functionality of the code does not alter. On the other hand, as there is no involvement of automated regression test, it becomes really hard to make sure the functionality intact with no changes in it. To overcome this situation it is recommended to start writing test cases for the legacy code to make sure that nothing unintentional gets altered in legacy code.

Bearing in mind that legacy code will encompass oodles of logic in a free way, it becomes daunting to begin writing test cases too. Also, it is very difficult to finish entire test cases at a stroke. Detection of the part of the useful test cases of the legacy code is a difficult job too. As designers, when encountered with legacy code change task, we are of a mind to re-write the whole application from scrape rather than make an effort to repair the old one. Making the minimum viable change is the key though, i.e. making the smallest disruptive alteration that totally repairs the problem before making an effort to clean and refactor any legacy code. It is all about preparing the case in business terms with a support for the alteration and reasonable financial plan to reap maximum profits and achieve desired results.

The slide of revising legacy code

To begin with, we need to understand that whether the changes required are non-technical or operational. Based on that, we need to move ahead. First and foremost, resources used should be the same for keeping up both the old system and the new. The same developers are needed as they know the current environment as well as the past one and they will prove to be fruitful in this terrible environment. With proper insights on the current situation they seem to be perfect to design the system as it should be. Also, getting hold of the essential means and structure, as per the situation to set up extra service must be taken care of. Who is answerable for making the judgment of re-doing the system, or do you want consent from upper authorities? In case, if they are non-technical, can you be responsible for them with the essential impetus they need for re-doing the system. Various factors such as: project consultations, forming procedures, replicating alterations in one structure in the other etc. must also be pondered. These are disadvantages and concerns you will have to bear in mind.

However, these things can be avoided if the given pointers are contemplated along with the usage of modern tools and techniques to mitigate some of the risks that come with the legacy code changes.

A safety net is needed before re-writing the code to identify or catch the unintentional bad build in advance of deployment of the application. For a smooth sail, it is suggested that some time must be spent developing a deployment procedure and a release channel. Become aware of unpredicted performance in legacy code with error checking. Take advantage of these approaches, but surely they are not a silver bullet solution for the existing problems as discussed.

Significant takeaways

In a few words, here are the important facts (diagram shown below) that will help you challenge and overcome codebase in the long run:

Make sure that you have completely understood the Legacy code prior to the alterations. Also, make sure that the approach is systematic and sequence diagrams are created to make things easier and understandable. A small and incremental improvements or changes are suggested to avoid losses. If bigger changes are needed, then the business case must be made and the approval of the higher authorities must be taken.  Go with the flow of the code while making alterations, and if, just in case if you want to take the code in a new path cut off your changes and use the Connector Pattern to fit in.

Conclusion

Legacy code must be managed by some means. Though it is a nuisance for most of the developers, as it comes without any documentation but still we have to deal with it with lots of reworking. While dealing with Legacy code, it is all about improving the existing environment within the capabilities of a software developer. Absence of pre-written trials, absence of complete knowledge of the code being reworked and unfortunate arrangement in our reworking processes leave us with a clutter of code over and over again. Though a legacy system is an ancient way or application program still it is widely used, normally as it still functions for the consumers’ requirements. With the advent of new tools and techniques, things have become much easier and this code can be managed by taking advantage of these tools and techniques.

So, control it before it starts controlling you, taking into account all the pros and cons.

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Principles of Fluid Leadership

Principles of Fluid Leadership

In this sound-bite era, the manner in which, teams at all stages of a firm nowadays do their businesses has transformed extraordinarily in the past few years.  Pretty good number of administrators in India wishes their expertise investments to attain in large amounts, ahead of time.  They view expertise as a strategic application without taking into account of why their firms started the difficult ride of interruption in the first place. Instead the leaders should view expertise as a long-term value generator. With this attitude of leaders, the work environment is becoming more difficult, unstable, and irregular without yielding any profits as desired. To overcome this situation, it is recommended to exclude the old teachings which have been passed down from the business economy and embrace the modern teachings. As we all know that, teams at all stages of a large firm have to negotiate everyday work environment.  And even though this poses difficulties for all, it makes leadership roles – challenging for the most part.

Leadership environment shift and the consequences

Leadership roles must be able to reap profits from the available business strategies, and then assign a distinct set of persons to implement that strategy. So, the available context does matter a lot and play an important role in giving success to a leader. It is all about handling the complex and volatile business environment with ease yielding the desirable results. Moving into new roles seems a major problem, as the leaders are not able to adapt to changes quickly and in turn, fail to meet the objectives. Another reason being that either the leaders in place are not equipped enough to handle the complex business situation and can handle the company’s future as it should be. Though a lot of leadership programs are offered by a lot of companies to combat the situation, still it is about time to discover some perspective, as per the business environment. To deal this situation – leadership programs must contemplate the wider perspective in which leaders work – the distinctive circumstances and tasks specific to that leader and the firm. From this time forth, firms need to be swift and quick to respond to ever-changing circumstances, rivals, and markets.

Time to find the perspective

Companies need to get a lot superior at guessing who is likely to get to the top in a particular leadership role, but do not know in what way to get there. A clear route has to be mapped out by combining a leader’s work perspective, the distinctive circumstances and challenges that a leader faces to improve the leader’s performance for the better. From the product, plan, to team players, and changing aspects of the business, all these perspectives must be in place, as these parameters can either make or break a leader’s performance. These parameters with a defined perspective must be able to calculate the comparative assets and flaws of any leader, their aptness for a specific role, and their growth and performance in that role. Management of complexities and uncertainties around these parameters is the key for the leaders to produce desirable results. With so many things involved, it is inevitable that the available context would present distinctive challenges, holding an in-built amount of difficulty. Therefore, it is recommended that leaders must possess definite principles to sail across them without any glitches. However, certain principles of the business economy are much less relevant these days as businesses are working in an era of imagination that calls for a novel prototype of leadership.

The principles or skills needed by Leaders for success

For a company to attain success in the long run, a kind of leadership possessing certain principles, has to be in place that generates a continuous management channel that can retort to present and forthcoming business challenges with ease. It is time for that type of leadership that generates long-term value and spends in employee and investor arrangement. Also, the leaders must be able to form a learning association, which is adaptable and transforms swiftly and is able to leverage the available infrastructure and circumstances with great effect. Hence, it is essential to identify the corporate reactions to a frequent problem that are generally unproductive.

Let us discuss these characteristics in detail that prop up this context-specific tactic to dealing leaders in organizations.

The quantity and nature of circumstantial tasks

These days, a lot of business leaders are not able to cope up with the difficulty and conjunction of the features that are altering the nature of their business. Features such as: environment, client prospect, evolving rivals, ability potentials, and evolving tech are creating a complex work environment, which is harming the performance of their most important employees including the leaders. There is a need of closing the ever-widening gap between the exponential progress of technology-driven market prospects and the right growth by adopting new methods of thinking and functioning. More sustainable competitions with rapid research, learning, and modification are the need of the hour.

The right challenges must be provided to the assigned leaders

It is not necessary that all leaders are not able to thrive when facing complexities and contextual challenges, some can with their creativity and methodical approach. Hence, it is necessary that the temperament behaviours of the leader with the complexities they are anticipated to handle must be matched. Ability gap check must be done prior to the assignment of today’s challenges to the main leaders.

The New Leadership Model

A new prototype known as Fluid Leadership seems to be the perfect solution to this old-fashioned leadership.

To begin with, one of the most fundamental features of Fluid Leadership is all about embracing unpredictability enthusiastically. Additional vital nature of fluidity is to know the same method does not exist for all, even in the same sphere. Fluidity is more of a learned ability, and continuous use, authentication, and perfection are required to excel at it.

Introductory abilities that Fluid Leaders would want to get to the top are as follows –

• Fluid leaders must display abilities outside their main area. Attaining new abilities and keeping themselves up with everything is the key for the leaders. Also, they must considerably participate in technical developments.
  Persistent networking is required from effective leaders for tactical purposes, nurturing associations across regions, while moving on with their determined plan of technology-led revolution.
• They are brave creative thinkers. One of the more remarkable features of fluid leaders is that they track technical investments from the viewpoint of potentials and prospects, keeping in mind the prospect of people and the role of expertise in this future.
• They keep their focus on fundamentals; they have desirable transparency of purpose and the persistence of going ahead. They help organizations to generate and support independent and empowered teams.
• They must be contextually aware, and must be able to identify the problems and know the modifications in and between areas – of language, ethos, and main performance pointers.
• They are considered to be the value initiators. It is necessary that they make efforts and take time in examining and considering the findings which addresses their current and future requirements of the business dynamics.

Conclusion

To sum up, the principles mentioned in this article are not a sure shot for successful leadership, in the new age of instability and confusion. The lone correct move is for leaders to take on, become accustomed, and attain new abilities that are applicable to the new business dynamic of an organization. In spite of obstacles, fluid leaders rise to the occasion. Analysing the alternatives thoroughly into the options, probabilities and perspectives is the key for a fluid leader to be successful. The key to success is to plan and implement relevant ideas and principles in the organization. It is all about looking at the horizon and inspiring people.
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Design Thinking, Agile and Lean – How they complement & work together

Design Thinking, Agile and Lean – How they complement and work together

A lot of large and small companies are initiating to board upon brave conversion strategies and set up revolution players, as the pace of software releases keep on accelerating from time to time. For this very reason, more and more company experts are being introduced to a domain in which footings like design thinking, lean, adapt and agile are used virtually interchangeably, as providing continuous updates and incessant developments calls for novel methods of philosophy and working in partnership. A lot of people fall prey to the rule of the mechanism preference, keeping a strong faith that design thinking, agile and lean is the magic bullet way out for their invention afflictions. Though design thinking is certainly an extremely great ideation and prototyping device but it is only one step in the entire method and same goes for lean and agile.

How blending these approaches help in team renovation?

For delivering value further than momentarily spurring workforces, the approaches must be combined and brought into line properly to acquire commercial, or any invention correct for that matter. They must take account of the following things, such as: arrangement of the procedures and strategies, structures, means and beliefs and must support the environment. Things should move smoothly in carrying out trial in tandem with the existing philosophy of the company. Professional model should be such that it is able to mint money, as it is the transformation flanked by sheer creation and invention. The myriad things of an innovation spectrum such as: evaluating models, price arrangements, supply networks, client sections, advertising networks need to come together similar to a smooth-running device for a trade to be fruitful. Design thinking can be worked into some structural environment but in order for invention to flourish at a big firm and for notions to go from nil to some, the fundamental atmosphere must be supportive. It definitely offers your teams the prospect to play a part in additional gratifying and satisfying work as not a single person wishes to devote a lot of time providing something that does not generate effect or supply cost.

Planning consistent demonstrations

To begin with, we need to outline our views and expectations along with discovering the most essential problem space to testing with several way outs. And lastly, we need to plan trials that will provide knowledge to the team members for continuously improving a real solution.

However, in order to run through such methods, the surroundings also must be supportive. Prior to the run through of these approaches you need to ponder the following questions to yield profitable results:

• Are the things clear for working together or alone?
• Are the employees under any pressure to deliver it within a time frame?
• Are the employees comfortable in sharing their ideas?
• Is the environment for employees under some sort of fear to be bang on all the time?

After all, it is all about working and accomplishing together, so we need to look at the observations within each realm, in detail.

Approaches

As a result, before going on ahead let us understand the difference between agile, lean and design thinking. Specialists new to the space are not able to spot the difference between design thinking, the lean and agile. These are three methods of constant deployment and incessant development and each one has its peculiar constituencies, and approach. Design Thinking is in what manner we discover and decipher glitches. Lean is our outline for analysing our theories and learning our way to the correct results. Agile is in what way we become familiar to altering circumstances with software.

 Design Thinking

Design Thinking is all about skill and knowledge; skills like dealing with uncertainty, combination, and testing, among others. The skills of a designer depend on casing a problem, and discovering possible answers. All and all, significance and novel concepts begin when we discover stuffs. Discovering those problems and solutions to these problems is Design Thinking and it is an approach that aids us to do it better.

Lean Start-up

When a proper way out is recognized and planned, it is time to bring together lean thinking into the method. Lean thinking alters the philosophy of your people, it is a method of thinking and performing and not just a set of implements and that taking up the method. In this digital age, stuffs are excessively multifaceted, random, and too vigorous to be organized, and as we all know that it is not possible to efficiently control all expanses at all spells. For that reason, the accomplishment of a revolution is basically interconnected to our skill to converse and act as a team efficiently through procedure, instructions, and ways. Lean gives a diverse frame of mind for handling any structure of labour. Basically, Lean is all about discovering ambiguity, creating choices by carrying out trial and knowledge, and permitting individuals to attain sought after results. Be adaptive, not analytical with Lean.

Agile

Agile is in a way interconnected to Lean. However, the dissimilarities are generally about what these approaches are useful to, and by what method. In situations of great doubt, Agile offers means to form software that is vigorous and can become accustomed to modification. It is not about revolving the solutions, but it is also about climbing and progressing solutions over a spell. The temperament of Agile is becoming accustomed to altering requirements with software in a smooth manner.

Put simply, if you want to get your hands on superior notions then design thinking comes into play. And then, the lean start-up aids us turn those notions into corporate prototypes that work. Lastly, agile aids in supplying the creation to market in a firm and incremental way with the aim of receiving continuing pointers-get a feel for it and supply exactly what the client needs. This can be well understood with the help of a diagram shown below:

Design thinking agile and lean

Fig 1: Three approaches of Product Development

When design thinking, the lean and agile are combined together, not only the specialists are able to come up with superior notions but they are able to turn those notions into feasible money making notions by providing them in a manner that generates instant worth for clienteles and in turn, reducing the price and plan glitches.

The most important thing to be kept in mind is to abridge a good and worthy model trial effect with solid similarity for the glitch, or client request for the answer. Each of those approaches has distinct apprehensions, and they call for diverse learning methods.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, these three approaches of product development help small and big firms in building superior products. Also, they help in getting to the bottom of your working class prospective to generate extra effect and lead more satisfying lives.  Blending all the three approaches of product development by placing product discovery in order and delivery work in the same way to each and every team member will definitely transform the teams.

When all is said and done, one thing which is pretty clear is that the prospective clienteles do not bother whether the approach practiced is agile, lean or design thinking. The only things which matter to them are the great products and services provided to them, which are able to decipher significant glitches for them in real methods. From this time, the maximum focus should be on the teams for the functioning of the processes in a smooth manner. It is all about making individuals familiar about the chunks of the procedures, and making use of their philosophy and offerings in the direction of constant supply and continuous development. Each approach is important to meeting the loads of today’s inventiveness for quick and continuous software supply.
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What is Splunk?

You must be aware of the exponential growth in machine data over the last decade. It was partly because of the growing number of machines in the IT infrastructure and partly because of the increased use of IoT devices. This machine data has a lot of valuable information that can drive efficiency, productivity and visibility for the business. Splunk was founded for one purpose: To Make Sense Of Machine Generated Log Data.

The Splunk platform uses machine data—the digital exhaust created by the systems, technologies and infrastructure powering modern businesses—to address big data, IT operations, security and analytics use cases.

Machine data is valuable because it contains a definitive record of all the activity and behavior of your customers, users, transactions, applications, servers, networks and mobile devices. It includes configurations, data from APIs, message queues, change events, the output of diagnostic commands, call detail records and sensor data from industrial systems, and more.

The challenge with leveraging machine data is that it comes in a dizzying array of unpredictable formats, and traditional monitoring and analysis tools weren’t designed for the variety, velocity, volume or variability of this data. This is where Splunk comes in.

Splunk captures, indexes, and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards, and visualizations. It is basically a horizontal technology used for application management, security and compliance, as well as business and Web analytics. The insights gained from machine data can support any number of use cases across an organization and can also be enriched with data from other sources. The enterprise machine data fabric shares and provides access to machine data across the organization to facilitate these insights. It’s what we call Operational Intelligence.

Real time processing is Splunk’s biggest benefit because it has seen storage devices get better and better over the years. The processors become more efficient with every ageing day, but not data movement.

The other benefits with implementing Splunk are:

• Your input data can be in any format for e.g. .csv, or json or other formats
• You can configure Splunk to give Alerts / Events notification at the onset of a machine state
• You can accurately predict the resources needed for scaling up the infrastructure
• You can create knowledge objects for Operational Intelligence

We could see the detail and benefits of Splunk in the subsequent blogs. Do write to us on info@anarsolutions.com for further details.
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