STAREAST 2020 Concurrent Session : Agile in Legacy Apps - Mission Impossible?

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Wednesday, May 6, 2020 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Agile in Legacy Apps - Mission Impossible?

How many times did you hear - legacy systems are not a good fit for Agile transformation? Have you ever said it yourself? I want to tell you a story of a digital transformation in Premier to prove you wrong. Agile is not only a great fit for the legacy applications, it an absolute business necessity, because how else can you provide incremental value for hundreds or thousands of users through a flexible adjustable roadmap? My story is not going to be about an immediate success. We've had our fair share of problems, challenges, and small failures. "Legacy" means "old". It means - outdated technology stack, messy dependencies, code that nobody understands, manual testing, manual builds, manual deployments, redundant features. Also, customer issues, bugs, performance issues, scalability concerns. Wait, did I mention dependencies? Come to the session if any of this sounds familiar, if you're afraid of starting the Agile transformation, or if your company already went through a number of initiatives but the old habits die hard. I will share the valuable lessons we've learned from our experience, the strategies to apply to make the changes stick, as well as the anti-patterns to watch for.

Katy Sherman
Premier Inc.

Katy Sherman started her career as a developer, then development manager. She worked for a number of companies, was introduced to Agile, loved it, and tried to apply those ideas wherever she could. In her current job of Director of Software Engineering she was put her in charge of a cross-functional group of developers and testers. Together they went on a journey to transform several huge business critical healthcare applications into nimble, robust and scalable products.