How to motivate team to work on legacy products

We are a team working on legacy code which is pretty old and written i开发者_Go百科n languages of initial programming days. As the team members are trained in latest technology and are now put to work on legacy code, they are not happy. How to motivate them to work in legacy code also?

Send your team to meet users and watch them use software. They should find out what are most critical problems users have with that software.

Getting to know users makes work more real - your team will know that adding new functionality or eliminating some bugs will help some real person. That should motivate programmers to get boring job done.

Only cash can not make the developers happy. You should provide them good environment so that they can pay attention to their work.

Another thing is no technology is bad OR legacy OR older. Thing is if your company needs to maintain it, then you must keep it going. But keep all standards for designing, coding, testing, code review, interactive sessions etc..

Also you can motivate them to convert your legacy code to some new platform for better performance and maintainability. Every company does that even once i think, because they want to compete with other market products.

Also provide them some cool sessions for other technologies which are used in your company but they don't know or use. Let them be deeply in the things, give them proper time and support for problem solving. Main goal is to deliver on time with less rework and bugs.

Provide some rewards towards their work and keep them happy about their work.

thanks.

i really like "Send your team to meet users and watch them using software"

If i have to motivate my team, I will really ask my developer to visit the use and find out how much user is happy with the product.

I will really like to take challenge on how we can make it more better then what exist.

Do you have some scope for retiring the legacy code in the foreseeable future? If so, "we only need to keep this going until..." might sweeten the pill.

Are the team members experienced in the languages/environments which the legacy code is written in? If not, it might be simple reluctance to do something that they don't know how to operate. Possibly scheduling in some time for them to gain at least a passing familiarity might be in order; provided it's not too much of a paradigm shift from latest technology, it shouldn't be all that hard?

Are the team members only allowed to work on the legacy code team or can their time be split between different projects? I don't think anyone is going to be happy about spending a 40 hour week on FORTRAN debugging. But if you have to spend a few hours on the legacy code knowing that you can take breaks during the day to work on something you actually enjoy it's a little less painful.

And I'll reiterate what was said before about making sure the team members have time to learn and gain experience with the old technologies before throwing them in there. Try to make the training enjoyable too. Our legacy code training was set up as a competition to see who could come up with the fastest/shortest/most complete/etc solution to interesting problems rather than having to look exclusively at the code we were to be working on. Really, that could be applied to the team's plan even if you don't have time set aside for training. Add a little competition to the task at hand or allow a little bit of time for challenging and competitive side projects.

How are they getting rewarded for working on these legacy products? Do you know what motivates them? Some people may prefer timely recognition and praise while others may expect cash or understanding that this isn't necessarily what they signed up for when they initially took the job. I'd be tempted to suggest having 1:1 meetings to see what would they like that would make them happier. Is it more money? More flexibility in time off? Training in the legacy technologies? Affirmation that they are doing good work on these ancient systems, as the initial programming days makes me think of mainframes and other really old tools that one may wonder, "How much longer will this run really?"

Cash isn't the answer. Free food, soft drinks, whatever, that only goes so far at alleviating the drudgery of legacy code work. What about trying to change their perspective?

"Anyone can do good work with modern code that has a nice IDE with refactoring built in, a ton of resources just one Google search away, but we proud few, we band of brothers, we are good enough to do this with ancient procedural languages. We'll tame this awful mess of code and do it with one hand behind our backs and create processes and tools to make sure the next poor bastards won't have it so bad."

I would say the simplest way to attract the most positive emotion from developers to legacy coding would be to make the old new in some way.

Have a session or two to identify what it is that the legacy code does, and then get an idea of what it would take to do it anew on a new architecture. The "new architecture" part is key, because 9/10 times, it's the architecture that is dreaded (spaghetti code, pre-standard conventions, etc...).

If you can't get your re-write estimates approved, then at least work out a plan to get your refactoring of legacy code into the daily maintenance. At the very least your developers will feel as though they are working towards something, and something new at that, instead of just monkey-wrenching the old decay that no one wants to even remember.

Just my 2¢.

You can for example try to do fancy things on the testing side. Try out mocking frameworks etc.

Try also emphasize that handling legacy code is a good experience if you want to become a solid programmer, since every technology becomes eventually legacy.

Extra cash? :) Don't know anything else...

Even if it's new technologies legacy code it's not always a pleasure to work on such code, so on "initial technologies"... i guess the only motivating thing is to discover how programming was these days...

The amount of Time required in spending motivating the team and learning the legacy code and fixing it half heartedly can easily be used to build the same stuff in new platform , given the amount of resources , IDEs , expertise , frameworks etc available for free, the Good news you have the system in place you just need to meet the same behavior in new platform unlike we have to build something new for some product whose behavior and user experience we dont know .