We modernize legacy systems
Our clients want to leverage their legacy systems but they don't know how to change them. They've often tried unsuccessfully in the past. In some cases, their business critical systems have become black boxes and are even coded in languages that no longer exist. We start with helping them see their systems. Once they do, we help them change their systems confidently.
A typical engagement
1. Problem identification: 3h
We start with a workshop with you to identify the system problem. Typically it's one's visible to the business like: How to modularize the system to enable faster iterations? How to migrate a critical system to the cloud? How can we the data pipeline's performance to make decisions faster? How can we scale the system to meet demand?
2. Strategic assessment: 1-3 months
Every problem requires visibility into the system. That's the strategic assessment's goal. We work our way through the technical details of your systems through contextual tools. The result is a description of options for your decision and a set of contextual tools to help you reproduce the results.
3. Steering migrations: 3+ months
Once a direction is chosen, we join, guide and coach your team to steer the system. We rely on contextual tools that we continuously develop to visualize, check and change the system according to the problems the team discovers along the way.
A tale of two roles
To make effective decisions, we first need to ask questions of the system and then answer them promptly. These are two distinct skills. The ability to ask good questions is developed through continuous practice, much like strengthening muscles through weightlifting. On the other hand, the ability to answer questions can be taught. The key to answering them lies in how quickly you can create tools to do so. Ideally, these tools should be built in minutes or hours, not days, weeks, or months. This is where Glamorous Toolkit excels—delivering tools in minutes.
This approach fosters a virtuous cycle: each answer leads to better questions, refining our mental model of the system. Two roles are central here: the Stakeholder, who asks the questions, and the Facilitator, who provides the answers.
In a strategic assessment engagement, we act as the Facilitator. By answering questions swiftly, we not only develop a comprehensive understanding of the system, but we also empower the Stakeholder to strengthen their questioning ability. In a steering migration engagement, we teach you to become the Facilitator. These skills can then be applied to some of the most challenging issues an enterprise may face, such as migrating a legacy system or insourcing previously outsourced work.
Do we work in your industry? What about your specific technology?
We probably do. If not, we'll learn.
We worked with various domains including insurance, transportation, hospitality, semiconductors, data privacy, retail, automotive, and acoustics. And we worked with systems written in a variety of languages and technologies like Java/SpringBoot, C#, JS/Angular/React, Python, PHP, Smalltalk, C++, Qt, Delphi, COBOL, SQL, PEGA and even proprietary languages.
Our good enough pathway to making reasonable decisions
- We start with a question about a system.
- We answer the question by building a tool.
- Each tool is built in minutes, hours or days.
- Every tool we build helps you understand how things fit together in a model of the system, like building a puzzle out of pieces.
- As the model of the system expands it enables you to ask more questions.
- The end goal is to build a good enough model to allow you to make reasonable decisions about the system.
What people say about us
We wanted to move a component that is considered off limits… We gave it to them … How did you guys do it in such a short amount of time? … We believe in your methodology.
Chris Thorgrimsson
Senior Technical Director, LamResearch.com
As Saloodo was transforming our MVP to a market ready product, feenk helped us with software assessments that shed accurate insight into the system that helped steer its development into the right direction towards building a robust, extendable and scaleable platform that could adapt to business requirements much faster.
Elaine Tan
CTO, saloodo.com
While thinking of a common code base for our software products we were going in circles not knowing where to start. The feenk team supported us not only with analysis tools but more importantly by coaching our teams how and where to start the restructuring and how this could become a feasible project to tackle. First steps have been taken to do analysis-based refactorings while still delivering features in parallel. We still have a long way to go but the initial hurdles are overcome!
Jan Biermann
Head R&D, dbaudio.com
Why us?
We bring a unique experience covering the whole spectrum, from a single line of code to decisions made at the company executive level.
We base our work on state-of-the-art scientific work. We actively research and develop new tools and techniques for thinking with and about software systems.
Our work was validated for more than a decade of working with highly difficult problems in legacy systems in multiple domains.
