Get more from the software you already have.
Replacing an existing application is not always the best answer.
If your system already supports an important part of the business, a complete rebuild can be expensive, disruptive and unnecessary.
Often the better option is to improve the areas that are causing problems while keeping the parts that already work.
Your system may need improving, not replacing.
- Important pages or processes have become slow
- Staff are working around missing functionality
- Small bugs keep causing frustration
- The system no longer matches the way the business operates
- Manual processes have grown around the application
- Older parts of the code are becoming difficult to maintain
- The application needs to connect to newer services or APIs
- Reporting or data access is more difficult than it should be
Understand what is worth keeping.
When working with existing software, I do not start by assuming it should be rebuilt.
First I want to understand how the application is used, which parts are valuable, where the problems are and what risk is involved in changing it.
That might lead to a small targeted improvement, a series of gradual changes or, occasionally, a recommendation that a larger replacement should eventually be considered.
Typical improvements
- Add new functionality
- Improve slow database queries or application performance
- Simplify awkward workflows
- Fix recurring bugs
- Automate manual steps around the existing system
- Integrate with third-party services
- Improve reporting
- Modernise older areas gradually
Example scenario
Improving a slow operational screen
An important screen has gradually become slower as the amount of business data has increased.
Rather than rebuilding the whole application, the first step could be to investigate how the page loads its data, identify expensive queries and improve the parts causing the bottleneck.
A focused change can sometimes deliver a significant improvement without disrupting the rest of the system.
Legacy PHP applications are welcome.
I am comfortable working with established PHP applications, including systems built with CodeIgniter and other traditional PHP architectures.
Older software can still be valuable business software. The important question is whether it remains reliable, maintainable and useful to the people depending on it.
Technical capability
PHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, MySQL / SQL, JavaScript, performance investigation, integrations and gradual modernisation.
Does your existing software need some attention?
Tell me what is slow, awkward, missing or regularly causing problems.