Blueprint’s own VP of Products, Tony Higgins, has written a piece for SearchSoftwareQuality about how to maintain and enhance legacy applications, effectively by reverse-engineering their requirements:

The skills of a forensic detective are required to gain an understanding of a legacy application’s implementation and its purpose. This understanding is essential to reducing risk and to making development feasible. Understanding is achieved by identifying the possible sources of information, prioritizing them, filtering the relevant from the irrelevant, and piecing together a jigsaw puzzle that elucidates the evolution of the application that has grown and changed over time. This understanding then provides the basis for moving forward with the needed development and hopefully turning the corner, providing a foundation for subsequent development.

Learn how to be a detective, here.