Restoring a legacy: lessons learned

Rebuilding a legacy system has some parallels to the restoration of a work of art. The authors draw upon this comparison to illustrate the challenges they faced in redesigning a telephony system. The restoration involved far more than updating the code, the development team also had to understand the existing architecture, add new functionality, and develop a long-term hardware migration plan. The technical and managerial lessons learned should prove valuable to those involved in similar projects.