Legacy migrations rarely fail loudly.
What I’ve seen far more often is a slow stall — sprint after sprint — where migration work loses priority to features, production issues, and shifting context. Teams still believe they’re progressing, but the system gradually becomes harder to reason about than what they started with.
Interestingly, this isn’t usually an architecture problem. It’s delivery reality:
• Migration work competing with visible feature pressure
• Context loss when key engineers rotate
• Tooling and cleanup being deferred “until later”
• Hybrid systems quietly increasing complexity
The technical plan may be sound — but execution friction compounds over time.
These patterns show up across companies, industries, and team sizes. They’re less about frameworks and more about how real software delivery behaves under pressure.
Curious how others here recognize early signs that a migration is drifting instead of progressing.
I documented these recurring patterns and warning signals in a short checklist-style breakdown here, for teams that want to assess migration readiness:
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