You know what legacy software is. It’s what other people write and what other people use. Right? Wrong. “The minute you ship code, you have legacy software,” argues Jean Yang, founder and CEO of Akita Software. “There’s stuff that binds you. You can’t change it. I don’t remember things I did last week, and I think that’s true of every single person out there that creates code.”
We normally think of “legacy software” as applications written in COBOL and sitting on some mainframe somewhere. This kind of thinking leads developers to build code myopically, not thinking of who will have to read their code later. As Yang points out, this includes just about everyone, including the original developer of the code.
