A Methodology for Migrating Large Products to New Technology Stacks without Interrupting Development

Citation: Nizamutdinov Ilnar Rakipovich, "A Methodology for Migrating Large Products to New Technology Stacks without Interrupting Development", Universal Library of Innovative Research and Studies, Volume 01, Issue 02.

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The relevance of this research is determined by the growth of operational costs caused by the accumulation of technical debt in large monolithic software systems, which directly reduces competitiveness and slows down the time-to-market (TTM) of new products and functional changes. Unstable technical debt management practices, amplified by the fragmentation of business logic and the proliferation of isolated responsibility boundaries, transform into substantial direct and indirect financial losses. The aim of this study is to develop and empirically validate a comprehensive methodology for phased migration to modern technology stacks, ensuring continuity of development and operations (Zero Downtime) while simultaneously maintaining a high level of security and predictability of the production environment. The primary research approach is a systemic and comparative analysis of the architectural patterns Strangler Fig Pattern (SFP) and Branch by Abstraction (BbA), considered in conjunction with Data Driven Development practices, including the use of Feature Toggles and centralized server-side testing. Using the case of a large e-commerce service, the effects of implementing the proposed methodology are demonstrated: a 3–4-fold reduction in TTM (from 4–5 weeks to 1–1.5 weeks) and an approximately 4-fold decrease in labor effort required for implementing functional changes. It is shown that centralizing business logic and replacing 4,000 client-side tests with 1,000 server-side integration tests led to a 60% reduction in the number of critical incidents and to operational expenditure savings of more than 6 million USD annually. It is argued that the synergistic combination of the BbA and SFP patterns, complemented by the reengineering of the quality assurance system, constitutes a strategic and economically justified mechanism for the safe reduction of technical debt in high-load industrial systems. The results obtained have significant practical and theoretical value for chief architects, chief technology officers (CTOs), and researchers specializing in the modernization and evolution of complex software systems.

Keywords: Non-Disruptive Migration, Technology Stack, Strangler Fig Pattern, Branch by Abstraction, Time to Market, Technical Debt, Microservice Architecture, Backend for Frontend, Automated Testing, Zero Downtime.

https://doi.org/10.70315/uloap.ulirs.2024.0102012