I love CI but it does only works if it's continuous.
The scenarios I was describing don't lend themselves to it. It's usually vendor deployed, closed source software. Not an in-house production. That or it truly is ancient, from an era when CI wasn't a thing.
You can resurrect development but as I mentioned before, this can often involve resurrecting people, not just the project. And employing them indefinitely for something that —for the past 10 years— has been free. It's a bloody hard sell to higher management.
My last post wasn't my opinion. I wasn't advocating for never updating, I'm just passing along my experiences with the sorts companies that have systems they don't touch out of fear.
Totally true - resurrecting a project is hard, to say the least, particularly if years have passed. We're an isv/agency hybrid, and we deploy monthly. The stack started a decade ago but it's as modern as it was then.
Ultimately the onus sits with the implementers to think about maintainability, and the end-user to think in terms other than the immediate.
Unfortunately, many legacy systems were implemented with the "it'll be replaced soon" view, and 30 years on are still limping along.
The software we build today will, if the species survives, probably still be in use in a century or more.
Think of your great-grandchildren when you go "that'll do"!
The scenarios I was describing don't lend themselves to it. It's usually vendor deployed, closed source software. Not an in-house production. That or it truly is ancient, from an era when CI wasn't a thing.
You can resurrect development but as I mentioned before, this can often involve resurrecting people, not just the project. And employing them indefinitely for something that —for the past 10 years— has been free. It's a bloody hard sell to higher management.
My last post wasn't my opinion. I wasn't advocating for never updating, I'm just passing along my experiences with the sorts companies that have systems they don't touch out of fear.