How I turned the pain of inheriting legacy systems into an open-source framework that produces structured diagnostics — tested on real production code.
You inherit a system. 265 backend files, 209 frontend files, 80 stored procedures. Spring Boot 2.7 and Angular 14 — both end-of-life since November 2023. Business logic lives in SQL Server procedures that nobody fully understands. There are no tests. There is no architecture document. There is no modernization plan.
Management wants a roadmap by the end of the quarter.
If you've been in this situation, you know what happens next: weeks of reading code, drawing boxes on whiteboards, manually cataloging what's broken, and hoping you don't miss something critical hiding in a catch block.
I've done this exercise enough times to realize most of the work is mechanical — scanning for patterns, mapping dependencies, cataloging business rules, cross-referencing against OWASP. The judgment part (what to prioritize, how to phase the work, where the risk is) is genuinely hard. But the discovery part is tedious, repetitive, and error-prone when done manually.
