An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

The last phase of a migration is deprecating the legacy system that you’ve replaced. This requires getting to 100 percent adoption, and that can be quite challenging. Start by stopping the bleeding, which is ensuring that all newly written code uses the new approach. That can be installing a ratchet in your linters,25 or updating your documentation and self-service tooling. This is always the first step, because it turns time into your friend. Instead of falling behind by default, you’re now making progress by default. Okay, now you should start generating tracking tickets, and set in place a mechanism which pushes migration status to teams that need to migrate and to the general management structure. It’s important to give wider management context around migrations because the managers are the people who need to prioritize the migrations: if a team isn’t working on a migration, it’s typically because their leadership has not prioritized it. At this point, you’re pretty close to complete, but you have the long tail of weird or unstaffed work. Your tool now is: finish it yourself. It’s not necessarily fun, but getting to 100 percent is going to require the team leading the migration to dig into the nooks and crannies themselves. My final tip for finishing migrations centers around recognition. It’s important to celebrate migrations while they’re ongoing, but the majority of the celebration and recognition should be reserved for their successful completion. In particular, st...