tl;dr: you have probably not thought through all the ways this system is used. Make damn sure you have both rollback plans and a phased release in the works. Otherwise, all your bravery and effort will be at risk. My experience follows.
I took over a suite of flash video players/recorders for a company years ago. The variable names were exclusively 2 and 3 letter acronyms. No one on the team even knew Actionscript. Up until my hire, the various builds were all considered immutable since no one had any idea of where to start. Given their integral nature to the business, this effectively stagnated entire areas of product and business development.
What you put in our question was precisely my approach. I did my best to reverse engineer requirements by code review and sale people interviews. Once i had a confident list, i got approval and killed off what i can only assume were swaths of unused features no one knew about. Rewrote + rearchitected the entire thing from the ground up.
The release was worse than you would have expected. Turned out there were lots of these players linked outside of our website. These versions of the app were ones we had considered deprecated and were unknown to everyone in the company including the cofounding CTO. This required immediate rollbacks and hastened development to re-add features that were being used by a subset of our longest lasting clients.
While the releases themselves were rocky, the entire effort was an unquestionable success. The effort consolidated all the features into a single reusable player and opened up years of feature dev that enabled millions in new sales.
I took over a suite of flash video players/recorders for a company years ago. The variable names were exclusively 2 and 3 letter acronyms. No one on the team even knew Actionscript. Up until my hire, the various builds were all considered immutable since no one had any idea of where to start. Given their integral nature to the business, this effectively stagnated entire areas of product and business development.
What you put in our question was precisely my approach. I did my best to reverse engineer requirements by code review and sale people interviews. Once i had a confident list, i got approval and killed off what i can only assume were swaths of unused features no one knew about. Rewrote + rearchitected the entire thing from the ground up.
The release was worse than you would have expected. Turned out there were lots of these players linked outside of our website. These versions of the app were ones we had considered deprecated and were unknown to everyone in the company including the cofounding CTO. This required immediate rollbacks and hastened development to re-add features that were being used by a subset of our longest lasting clients.
While the releases themselves were rocky, the entire effort was an unquestionable success. The effort consolidated all the features into a single reusable player and opened up years of feature dev that enabled millions in new sales.