Excursion – Adding CI to existing software

If you work in a company, you will not always start on the green—that is, build a new project from the ground up. In fact, most likely it will be the opposite: when you join a company, you will be added to a team that has been working on one or more projects for a long time already.

You probably came across the terms legacy software or legacy system already. In our context, they describe software that has existed for a long time and is still in use in business-critical processes. It does not meet modern development standards anymore, so it cannot be easily updated or changed. Over time, it becomes so brittle and hard to maintain that no developer wants to touch it anymore. What makes it even worse is the fact that because the system grew over a longer time, it has so much functionality that no stakeholder (that is, the users) would like to miss it. So, replacing a legacy system is not that easy.

Not surprisingly, legacy...