This post is the result of a conversation I had the other day, over a few after-work beers with Andrew Knevitt. He deserves a large part of the credit (and/or blame) for this for starting the ball rolling. Andrew was bemoaning the amount of legacy he had to deal with and I immediately started talking about code and automated testing. This wasn't what Andrew was referring to though. He was working mostly with business process and was referring to the problem of legacy business process. We all know the problems of legacy code - hard to maintain, fragile, lots of manual testing required. Legacy business processes have similar problems - clumsy, fragile, constantly out of date, lots of manual work required, and so on.

We both agreed that legacy process was a problem but neither of us could come up with a good explanation of what made a business process legacy. It's more than age - some old processes work really well but some brand new ones are out of date as soon as the ink is dry. So what makes a business process legacy? During the course of the discussion, I trotted out one of the more common definitions of legacy code - legacy code is any code written without automated tests. That was when the lightbulb went on for both of us. Legacy business process is any business process without a built-in feedback loop. But not just any feedback loop. A 2 yearly process review cycle isn't enough. It has to be fast feedback.

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