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Legacy Modernization with Coding Agents

Legacy systems hold business value, but nobody wants to touch them. In this two-day hands-on workshop you learn how coding agents help you understand unfamiliar code, secure existing behaviour with tests and migrate in small, reviewable steps. Senior engineers plan the path and review every change. We work on a module of your own system or a sandbox project.

Request without obligation

Deutsche Version

Duration
2 days
Level
Advanced
Format
Remote or on-site, English or German
Group size
Up to 12 participants per trainer

Who it is for

  • Developers and architects maintaining long-lived systems
  • Tech leads planning a migration or framework upgrade
  • Teams that inherited code without documentation or tests

What your team will be able to do

  • Use agents to map and explain an unfamiliar codebase
  • Capture existing behaviour with characterization tests before changing anything
  • Plan a migration in small slices, such as strangler-style increments
  • Run agent-assisted upgrades of frameworks, language versions or libraries with review checkpoints
  • Decide where an agent should not be used and where manual work is safer
  • Document decisions so the next team can follow

Agenda

  1. Assessing the legacy landscapeIdentify modules, dependencies and risks, and choose a slice that is valuable and safe to start with.
  2. Understanding code with agentsGenerate call maps, summaries and open questions, and verify them against the running system.
  3. Characterization testsPin down current behaviour, including quirks, so that later changes can be compared against it.
  4. Migration in small stepsPlan and execute incremental changes with the agent, one reviewable Pull Request at a time.
  5. Upgrades and dependency changesLet agents handle repetitive refactorings and API changes while you control scope and review.
  6. Risk, rollback and sign-offDefine checks, feature flags and rollback paths, and decide what needs human sign-off.
  7. Documenting and handing overCapture architecture notes and decisions so knowledge stays in the team, not in a chat history.

Prerequisites

  • Solid experience with the legacy stack the team wants to modernize
  • Read access to a representative module, or a sandbox project we agree on
  • Familiarity with Git and Pull Request based reviews

Why apprat.io workshops

  • Taught by practising AI Code Engineers
  • Your repositories or a sandbox project
  • AI speed, human responsibility: review, security and governance included
  • ISO 9001 & ISO/IEC 27001 certified processes
  • Follow-up office hours after 30 days

Request without obligation

Tell us about your team and goals. We reply within one business day with a tailored agenda and a quote – free and without obligation.

24/7 call support in English & German:
+49 761 519 751 50

Frequently asked questions

Does this work for old languages such as COBOL or older Java?

Agents handle many older languages to varying degrees. We test on your actual code early in the workshop and are open about where results are weak.

Will the agent rewrite our whole system?

No, and we advise against it. The approach is incremental: small, tested slices with human review.

Can we bring confidential code?

Yes, if your policy allows it. We agree on the setup beforehand, and a sandbox project is always an option.

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