Legacy Conversion Risk Assessment

What actually goes wrong in legacy conversions — and how Triptych prevents it.

Why Legacy Conversions Fail

70% of large-scale legacy conversions fail or significantly exceed their budget and timeline. Not because the technology is hard — because the process is wrong. Here are the five failure modes we see most often:

1. Undocumented Business Logic

The legacy system contains decades of accumulated business rules — many undocumented, some contradictory, some only understood by people who no longer work there. Traditional rewrites discover these rules by breaking things in production.

2. Big-Bang Cutover Risk

The "flip the switch" migration strategy. Run both systems in parallel for months, then cut over everything at once. When it fails — and it usually does — there's no rollback path that doesn't lose data.

3. Scope Creep into Full Rewrite

What starts as "convert the billing module" becomes "well, billing touches invoicing, which touches the customer portal, which touches auth..." Six months later you're rewriting the entire system with no end in sight.

4. Quality Collapse at Speed

Under pressure to deliver, teams skip tests, skip reviews, and ship AI-generated code without verification. The new system works in demos but fails under real production load.

5. Knowledge Loss at Handoff

The conversion team finishes, hands over a codebase your team has never seen, and leaves. Your developers are now maintaining a system they didn't build and don't understand — which is exactly the problem you started with.

How Triptych Prevents Each Failure Mode

vs. Undocumented Business Logic

Triptych reads your entire legacy codebase and builds a semantic map of every business rule, workflow, dependency, and side effect — regardless of documentation. It doesn't rely on specs or tribal knowledge. It reads the code as-is and extracts what the system actually does.

Result: Nothing gets lost in translation because nothing is left to human memory.

vs. Big-Bang Cutover Risk

Each module is converted, tested, and cut over independently. The legacy system keeps running throughout. There is no big-bang moment. Each cutover is small, reversible, and validated against real production behavior before it goes live.

Result: Zero-downtime migration with rollback capability at every step.

vs. Scope Creep

The feasibility review defines exactly what will be converted, what won't, and where the boundaries are — before any code is written. Every sprint has a defined deliverable. Scope is locked, not discovered.

Result: Bounded engagement with visible milestones, not an open-ended rewrite.

vs. Quality Collapse

Every line of converted code passes through automated review gates, test harnesses validated against real production behavior, and human oversight. The workflow self-diagnoses regressions and corrects before they reach your branch. This is CMM-5 maturity built into the pipeline.

Result: AI speed with human-verified quality at every merge.

vs. Knowledge Loss

The Triptych semantic model doesn't just power the conversion — it becomes your documentation. Your team gets a complete, navigable map of the new system: every business rule, every dependency, every architectural decision. Plus full test suites, deployment docs, and a structured handoff.

Result: Your team understands the new system better than they understood the old one.

The Feasibility Review

Before you commit to a conversion engagement, we run a feasibility review: Triptych analyzes your legacy codebase and produces:

Semantic map — every business rule, dependency, and integration point identified
Conversion scope — what can be converted, what should be excluded, and why
Risk assessment — where the real complexity lives and what could go wrong
Timeline and effort — realistic estimate based on actual code analysis, not guesswork
Architecture recommendation — target stack, infrastructure, and migration strategy

The feasibility review is a paid engagement (typically 1–2 weeks). If we're not a fit, you keep the analysis — it's the deepest insight into your legacy system you've ever had. No one else will give you that.

Languages and Platforms We Convert From

COBOL
VB6 / VB.NET (legacy)
Classic ASP
Legacy Java (J2EE, Struts, pre-Spring)
PHP 5.x
Delphi / Object Pascal
FoxPro / dBase
PowerBuilder

Target Stacks

.NET 8 / C#
React / Next.js
Python / FastAPI
Go
Cloud-native on Azure, AWS, or GCP

Triptych is language-agnostic at the analysis layer — it understands intent, not just syntax.

Ready to Assess Your Legacy System?

Book a feasibility review. We'll run Triptych against your codebase and give you a clear picture of what a conversion looks like — scope, timeline, risk, and cost — before you commit.