I attended a Thoughtworks round table session last week.
To add to my notes on refactoring, the discussion was about replacing legacy systems – with refactoring.
I thought this was an interesting idea and it really highlighted the value of using refactoring as a low risk possibility for software development.
The speaker – Chris Stevenson, spoke about Martin Fowler’s StranglerApplication concept. The analogy is to an Australian strangler vine. The strangler will grow up and around a tree until it has completely smothered it. It sucks all of the nutrients out of the tree until there is nothing left. The idea is that when replacing legacy software systems we can take the same approach by building components around an existing system and then extracting all of the business value out of the system, until there is nothing of value left, and we can eventually throw it away.
The whitepaper for the same discussion was also presented at XP 2004.
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