Blog & Articles by Markus Harrer

LLM-assisted Abbreviation Mining for Legacy Systems

This blog post shows the process of mining abbreviations and discovering first concepts a COBOL legacy mainframe codebase is made of with the help of Large Language Models. It uses Python, pandas and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to generate insights that can be gathered from such a simple thing like a list of files.

Article

The Evolutionist

The current training and further education of software developers strongly focuses on the development of new software. Conferences and trade magazines are full of new programming languages, new tools, new hypes, which seemingly never cease to amaze. Quick results, direct feedback, and unprecedented productivity are suggested. The urge to incorporate the new into one’s software is awakened – until one is brought back to reality: their own legacy system.

Blog Post

Was treibt dich an?

Wie unterschiedliche Auslöser unterschiedliche Ansätze der Softwaremodernisierung bedingen

Blog Post

Evolving software like an orchardist

Software systems are usually larger, overgrown structures that developers need to bring back into shape after some time. However, creating an overview of the sprawling conglomerate of software components is challenging, let alone developing a clear plan for moving on. This blog post uses analogies from pruning apple trees to show developers how to evolve their software systems using a value-based approach.

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cards42 English edition

Finally, cards42 is available in English! The cards42 project supports software developers in your daily work with software architectures. 30 cards provide brief food for thought for stuck situations and help shed new light on difficult challenges. This article provides detailed explanations as well as the background and further information about the cards.

Blog Post

Software quality in the context of value chains and evolution

Mapping of quality attributes on a Wardley Map for a more informed assessment of software systems

Blog Post

Collaborative Learning with Mobshops

After a year with COVID-19 and plenty of online activities, I think we are tired with workshops that copy the offline world into an online setting. More interactive formats are needed. In this blog post, I briefly describe my learnings with a new format I’ve developed and piloted in practice: Mobshops.

Blog Post

Defect Analysis using pandas

Defect Analysis is a classic analysis technique to get insights into how buggy your system might be. In this blog post, we explore how Defect Analysis works and how we can implement it with a standard data analysis tool from Python: pandas.

Blog Post

Wenn Customizing zur Legacy wird

Analyse eines ERP-Systems mit Wardley Maps und strategischem Domain-driven Design

Article

cards42

Die Mitmach-Karten von cards42 unterstützten bei der täglichen Arbeit mit Softwarearchitekturen. Die Karten geben kurze Denkanstöße für festgefahrene Situationen und helfen, neues Licht auf schwierige Herausforderungen zu werfen. Dieser Artikel bietet ausführliche Erklärungen sowie die Hintergründe und weitere Informationen zu den Karten.