Kill It with Fire

Kill It with Fire

Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)

Marianne Bellotti

What kind of scenarios justify breaking things on purpose? The most common one when dealing with legacy systems is loss of institutional memory. On any old system, one or two components exist that no one seems to know exactly what they do. If you are seeking to minimize the system’s complexity and restore context, such knowledge gaps can’t just be ignored. Mind you, the situations when you can’t figure out what a component is doing from studying logs or digging up old documentation tend to be rare, but they do happen. Provided the system doesn’t control nuclear weapons, turning the component off and seeing what breaks is a tool that should be available when all other avenues are exhausted.
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