Case study

The plugin server project is a good example of how our understanding of a change in customer needs resulted in a modification to our thematic goal, which then effected how we solved the problem.

We were focusing on the goal of removing technical debt while maintaining backward compatibility with the plugin server.

A change in customer needs

Recently, we found out that some customers are willing to replace legacy components if they are not forced to do so within a certain amount of time.

A change in thematic goal

Previous goal: Remove technical debt, maintaining full backward compatibility

Given that customers are willing to replace old, legacy plugin servers with modern equivalents means that we can do a deeper removal of technical debt in certain areas of the code.

New goal: Remove technical debt and legacy features that can be replicated with modern counterparts

Given that we have less restrictions when removing technical debt, we can be much cruder in the removal, saving development efforts and being able to remove more legacy code.

Resultant change in problem definition

We were focused on removing technical debt in our codebase. We wanted to get rid of some of the technical debt that was nested in the plugin server libraries.

When we realized we could solve the problem by removing the plugin server entirely, it means that we can solve the problem more elegantly and with less development effort.