[maxxxxx]

" I would start by firing people that led to this situation."

You are one of those blessed people who can architect a system and the architecture holds up for decades. From my experience most systems will end up in a big mess over time if features get added. There is almost no way around it.

[flukus]

> You are one of those blessed people who can architect a system and the architecture holds up for decades.

This is exactly why maintenance is needed. Proper maintenance that includes things like updating the architecture and gradually migrating the whole system to that architecture, rebuilding small unwieldy components, updating and migrating database schemas as the product evolves, removing unused features.

If a product is just getting bugs patched and nothing else then it isn't really being maintained, it's being deprecated. Unfortunately as an industry we still think that there are distinct build and maintenance phases and that the latter can be done with less resources.

[bokonon12]

Yup. So much of the time the system starts out at one thing and morphs to another. That can easily lead to core problems with your architecture