How to implement the future?

Abstract

This paper sheds light on the realities of implementing spanking new ideas in existing software systems. Information is provided both on the advantages and drawbacks of starting from scratch and basing yourself on an existing software asset to implement your IT future. The paper touches upon the need for tool support to refactor existing software systems so that implementing their IT future is enabled. An idea of how such refactory tools look like is given and pointers to technical research contributions are provided. Those tools aid in overcoming the maintenance debt built up over the years. It is argued that implementing the future in IT amounts to dealing with the past to a large extent.