This pattern is part of "Patterns of Legacy Displacement"

Divert the Flow

First divert cross-organization activities away from legacy

20 January 2022

Ian Cartwright, Rob Horn, and James Lewis

A common feature of legacy systems is the Critical Aggregator, as the name implies this produces information vital to the running of a business and thus cannot be disrupted. However in legacy this pattern almost always devolves to an invasive highly coupled implementation, effectively freezing itself and upstream systems into place.

Figure 1: Reporting Critical Aggregator

Divert the Flow is a strategy that starts a Legacy Displacement initiative by creating a new implementation of the Critical Aggregator that, as far as possible, is decoupled from the upstream systems that are the sources of the data it needs to operate. Once this new implementation is in place we can disable the legacy implementation and hence have far more freedom to change or relocate the various upstream data sources.

Figure 2: Extracted Critical Aggregator

The alternative displacement approach when we have a Critical Aggregator in place is to leave it until last. We can displace the upstream systems, but we need to use Legacy Mimic to ensure the aggregator within legacy continues to receive the data it needs.

Either option requires the use of a Transitional Architecture, with temporary components and integrations required during the displacement effort to either support the Aggregator remaining in place, or to feed data to the new implementation.

How It Works

Diverting the Flow creates a new implementation of a cross cutting capability, in this example that being a Critical Aggregator. Initially this implementation might receive data from existing legacy systems, for example by using the Event Interception pattern. Alternatively it might be simpler and more valuable to get data from source systems themselves via Revert to Source. In practice we tend to see a combination of both approaches.

The Aggregator will change the data sources it uses as existing upstream systems and components are themselves displaced from legacy, thus it's dependency on legacy is reduced over time. Our new Aggregator implementation can also take advantage of opportunities to improve the format, quality and timeliness of data as source systems are migrated to new implementations.

Map data sources

If we are going to extract and re-implement a Critical Aggregator we first need to understand how it is linked to the rest of the legacy estate. This means analyzing and understanding the ultimate source of data used for the aggregation. It is important to remember here that we need to get to the ultimate upstream system. For example while we might treat a mainframe, say, as the source of truth for sales information, the data itself might originate in in-store till systems.

Creating a diagram showing the aggregator alongside the upstream and downstream dependencies is key. A system context diagram, or similar, can work well here; we have to ensure we understand exactly what data is flowing from which systems and how often. It's common for legacy solutions to be a data bottleneck: additional useful data from (newer) source systems is often discarded as it was too difficult to capture or represent in legacy. Given this we also need to capture which upstream source data is being discarded and where.

User requirements

Obviously we need to understand how the capability we plan to "divert" is used by end users. For Critical Aggregator we often have a very large mix of users for each report or metric. This is a classic example of where Feature Parity can lead to rebuilding a set of "bloated" reports that really don't meet current user needs. A simplified set of smaller reports and dashboards might be a better solution.

Parallel running might be necessary to ensure that key numbers match up during the initial implementation, allowing the business to satisfy themselves things work as expected.

Capture how outputs are produced

Ideally we want to capture how current outputs are produced. One technique is to use a sequence diagram to document the order of data reception and processing in the legacy system, or even just a flow chart. However there are often diminishing returns in trying to fully capture the existing implementation, it not unusual to find that key knowledge has been lost. In some cases the legacy code might be the only "documentation" for how things work and understanding this might be very difficult or costly.

One author worked with a client who used an export from a legacy system alongside a highly complex spreadsheet to perform a key financial calculation. No one currently at the organization knew how this worked, luckily we were put in touch with a recently retired employee. Unfortunately when we spoke to them it turned out they'd inherited the spreadsheet from a previous employee a decade earlier, and sadly this person had passed away some years ago. Reverse engineering the legacy report and (twice 'version migrated') excel spreadsheet was more work than going back to first principles and defining from fresh what the calculation should do.

While we may not be building to feature parity in the replacement end point we still need key outputs to 'agree' with legacy. Using our aggregation example we might now be able to produce hourly sales reports for stores, however business leaders still need the end of month totals and these need to correlate with any existing numbers. We need to work with end users to create worked examples of expected outputs for given test inputs, this can be vital for spotting which system, old or new, is 'correct' later on.

Delivery and Testing

We've found this pattern lends itself well to an iterative approach where we build out the new functionality in slices. With Critical Aggregator this means delivering each report in turn, taking them all the way through to a production like environment. We can then use Parallel Running to monitor the delivered reports as we build out the remaining ones, in addition to having beta users giving early feedback.

Our experience is that many legacy reports contain undiscovered issues and bugs. This means the new outputs rarely, if ever, match the existing ones. If we don't understand the legacy implementation fully it's often very hard to understand the cause of the mismatch. One mitigation is to use automated testing to inject known data and validate outputs throughout the implementation phase. Ideally we'd do this with both new and legacy implementations so we can compare outputs for the same set of known inputs. In practice however due to availability of legacy test environments and complexity of injecting data we often just do this for the new system, which is our recommended minimum.

It's common to find "off system" workarounds in legacy aggregation, clearly it's important to try and track these down during migration work. The most common example is where the reports needed by the leadership team are not actually available from the legacy implementation, so someone manually manipulates the reports to create the actual outputs they see - this often takes days. As no-one wants to tell leadership the reporting doesn't actually work they often remain unaware this is how really things work.

Go Live

Once we are happy functionality in the new aggregator is correct we can divert users towards the new solution, this can be done in a staged fashion. This might mean implementing reports for key cohorts of users, a period of parallel running and finally cutting over to them using the new reports only.

Monitoring and Alerting

Having the correct automated monitoring and alerting in place is vital for Divert the Flow, especially when dependencies are still in legacy systems. You need to monitor that updates are being received as expected, are within known good bounds and also that end results are within tolerance. Doing this checking manually can quickly become a lot of work and can create a source of error and delay going forwards. In general we recommend fixing any data issues found in the upstream systems as we want to avoid re-introducing past workarounds into our new solution. As an extra safety measure we can leave the Parallel Running in place for a period and with selective use of reconciliation tools, generate an alert if the old and new implementations start to diverge too far.

When to Use It

This pattern is most useful when we have cross cutting functionality in a legacy system that in turn has "upstream" dependencies on other parts of the legacy estate. Critical Aggregator is the most common example. As more and more functionality gets added over time these implementations can become not only business critical but also large and complex.

An often used approach to this situation is to leave migrating these "aggregators" until last since clearly they have complex dependencies on other areas of the legacy estate. Doing so creates a requirement to keep legacy updated with data and events once we being the process of extracting the upstream components. In turn this means that until we migrate the "aggregator" itself these new components remain to some degree coupled to legacy data structures and update frequencies. We also have a large (and often important) set of users who see no improvements at all until near the end of the overall migration effort.

Diverting the Flow offers an alternative to this "leave until the end" approach, it can be especially useful where the cost and complexity of continuing to feed the legacy aggregator is significant, or where corresponding business process changes means reports, say, need to be modified and adapted during migration.

Improvements in update frequency and timeliness of data are often key requirements for legacy modernisation projects. Diverting the Flow gives an opportunity to deliver improvements to these areas early on in a migration project, especially if we can apply Revert to Source.

Data Warehouses

We often come across the requirement to "support the Data Warehouse" during a legacy migration as this is the place where key reports (or similar) are actually generated. If it turns out the DWH is itself a legacy system then we can "Divert the Flow" of data from the DHW to some new better solution.

While it can be possible to have new systems provide an identical feed into the warehouse care is needed as in practice we are once again coupling our new systems to the legacy data format along with it's attendant compromises, workarounds and, very importantly, update frequencies. We have seen organizations replace significant portions of legacy estate but still be stuck running a business on out of date data due to dependencies and challenges with their DHW solution.

Significant Revisions

20 January 2022: