Renovate or Rebuild? Architectural techniques for the million euro tradeoff

At some point most of us will face the critical decision of whether to modernize a legacy system or rebuild it from scratch. While these decisions can make or break budgets and careers, I have observed that they are often driven by emotion, outdated assumptions and optimism, rather than facts, data and clear rationale.

This talk explains how an architecture-driven approach can help us to address the renovate-versus-rebuild dilemma, by moving beyond assumptions to use a decision framework based on proven architectural knowledge.

We'll explore how to analyse the context and gather the data we need to understand the tradeoffs that we face to enable a rational, architecture-driven but stakeholder-centric process that results in logical defensible options with clear tradeoffs.

Whether you're facing a creaking monolith today or are drowning in distributed technical debt, this session will give you a starting point and an approach to to make and defend your own legacy system decisions with confidence.