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> Why would a business do this ? If you are in charge of SW team, without too much SW knowledge, and you have to deliver something in the next 3 to 6 months to you customer, you would likely ask your architect/developers to do "same as previous product" but with a single modification for the new feature. This is the risk-free solution for the short term. Add to that that managers could change every 2 years, there are no incentive to take a big risk in rewriting or upgrading the technology. But this is also the boiling frog syndrome, in the long term you end up with a mess, and if you are in a competitive environment you are getting too slow and your company will be eaten alive. If you are relatively competitor free in your niche market, this could somewhat work... If you hope to achieve something, you need to have a least one supporter in the upper management. It is still very possible that they are unaware how bad the situation is (or they are but they don't care for the long term). So you're first short term goal, should be to communicate clearly what is wrong, and above all what it costs the company every quarter in term of time lost, bugs, etc. And you should propose an alternate solution with some roadmap (even long term one). "In X years, we will have moved to Z and it will allow us to gain Y" If you don't have at least one big ally, you'll never manage to have some time or resource to improve the situation. (It will probably be easier to convince some of your colleague). So if you can't rally any ally in the next 3 months, or at least find potential allies that are aware of the situation, walk away. PS : Even if this looks ugly, there might have been sound reasons that led to that mess. Every small decision in the past were maybe good for the time being. So don't judge too harshly your predecessors. Especially if you need to convince someone in upper management, that the decision he had taken 5 years ago, was absolutely horrible. (And since you are new, that could a very possible misstep) Edit : if you have been hired to speed up the dev process, at least someone has started to think that maybe something was wrong, so there is some hope ! |