Comment by Davertron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Davertron | Hacker News Reader

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My team has been working on a big-bang rewrite for about 5 years now. It started out as the "strangle" approach. Early on, everyone was on board with killing the old thing. But of course, you can't stop developing new features; you still need to make some forward progress in the midst of developing the new app. At the beginning we were 80% rewrite / 20% new feature work. But as time goes on, that balance has pretty much completely flipped; we're now more like 95% new feature work / 5% rewrite. Once we reached a certain critical mass of compatibility, the appetite for finishing the work and completely killing the old thing has pretty much disappeared. And there's a large loud minority that hate change and complain about having to use the new tool vs. the old tool.

FWIW, we were rewriting a Visual Basic 6 application using web technologies. It's VERY hard for me to imagine saying "don't rewrite that VB6 application, just make it better". It's literally not even supported by Microsoft anymore, it was written by one person at the company who has since left, no one else here writes VB6, etc. etc. It was a critical business application, so it wasn't the kind of thing anyone wanted to just leave alone and keep on life support.

Even still, it's hard for me not to wonder if we did the right thing. Maybe we should have just hired a bunch of VB6 contractors to maintain the application and continue adding functionality to it. Maybe moving it to VB.net would have been better. Maybe there's some other migration path for VB6 applications...

Anyway, my biggest takeaway from all of this has been: think very very hard (and be honest with yourself) about how long a rewrite will take. Make sure "the business" and you are on the same page about how long that's going to take and making a serious commitment to focus on migrating to the new tool, and if you can, get it down in writing the conditions necessary to kill the old tool. If your users are anything like ours, they're going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the new tool, because we all hate change, so if you don't have clear conditions about when you're shutting the old stuff off etc. then it's going to be painful.

In saying "If your users are anything like ours, they're going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the new tool", I think you miss how the end-user sees things. Having worked with many such end-user teams over decades, what I found was that the end-user is seen as the "troublesome" bit of the organisation and have to be corralled like "wild animals" (to use an euphemism).

If they are consulted and treated as if they have serious input to what is being developed, here I mean what they see and what they do, they become much more amenable to the new system.

What end-users really don’t like is being told how to do their jobs by people who do not do their jobs. Especially, when they are now required (for management purposes) to do something that does not fit into their work-flows. This is where the development teams have a strong place to collect information without user intervention by being very smart.

However, this also means that the development teams have to show that they are NOT just cost centres but are “profit” centres for the business as a whole. This takes a lot of effort to achieve this in many organisations because of the biases of other parts of those organisations to the IT challenge.

I agree that it's not uncommon to hear things on the development team that basically amount to "if it weren't for our users our application would be so much simpler" :)

We have spent a significant chunk of time working directly with our users during this migration. This is an internal tool, so we can literally walk over and talk to our user base if we have questions or want suggestions on things. We have done surveys, we track using analytics, we have a user council that we meet with regularly to run ideas by and get feedback on our work and they come to our sprint reviews (well, 3 of them do...) to see what new work we've done etc. etc.

This doesn't change the fact that you can't make everyone happy. One user will tell us that they hate the way a certain page is designed and that they won't use it because it doesn't fit their workflow. Another user will tell us the exact opposite. So we have to take the feedback and make a judgement call, using the data we have available, to try and make the best decision. One great thing about having analytics is it helps you identify squeaky wheels. We had some people on our user council that would basically complain about every single thing we did. If you just listened to them, you would have been tempted to just give up. When we looked at the data, we realized 90% of our user base was getting A LOT of work done, and we weren't hearing anything from them. Obviously it was possible they also hated the app and just didn't want to tell us, but after reaching out it became clear that they were perfectly happy with the way it worked and were just getting shit done. In my experience, the temptation is just to listen to the people you're getting feedback from and assume that they're a representative sample. DON'T. Do the work (or put the systems in place) to help you vet the feedback you're getting.

Another thing that makes this very difficult is one of the things you're touching on; trying to develop a tool for a domain that you don't have intimate knowledge of makes it pretty difficult to know which way to go when you are getting conflicting information. None of the developers is an expert user in the domain (or even a beginner for that matter...) and so we often end up having to look at things from a higher level (i.e. what other applications have we used that function this way? How do they solve this problem? etc.). I think this mostly works, but there are bound to be some misses here or there.

I don't disagree with you that there are end-users who are, shall we say, "difficult". That is the nature of having to work with a wide variety of different types of people. That is one of those "unenviable" things that happen. As far as not being "problem domain experts", I have found that getting the co-operation of the "most-liked" and "most-expert" of your end-users in that area can be helpful as to getting most people on side to give you the best chance of gathering what you need. This is not necessarily an easy find as I have had to work with some who don't like to lose their "control" and that can be frustrating, to say the least.

My original comment wasn't meant to say that getting end-users on side was going to be easy, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. But the reputational boost you get when you do, eases the next time something has to be done.

Curious how much the interface changed and if you think that plays a role in the sentiment towards it. VB6 I'd expect a desktop app or add-ins to office, going from that to web changes maybe more than necessary for the users.

I think this plays a role in the difficulty of the migration, because yes, the interface has changed quite a bit. In general, we tried to hew as close to the old paradigms as made sense. We never changed anything just because we didn't like it; we tried to make sure that the transition would be easy and the users didn't have to drastically change their mental models. But of course, there are always going to be differences in look/feel/capability between native applications and the web. I will say the web has come a long way since I started as a web developer 15 years ago and it feels like closing this gap is more a priority these days.

But there were parts of the application that were poorly designed (our users told us so...) and so, even though they were the primary ones driving change, there's always pain when changing to a new way of doing things.

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