01
Test strategy
A testing approach sized to the risk each part of the system carries, rather than uniform coverage nobody maintains.
QA, Modernisation & Reliability
Make changing the system stop being frightening.
Legacy is not about age. It is about whether you can change something safely — and how long it takes to find out that you could not.
Overview
Rewrites are the most expensive way to modernise. Usually they are also unnecessary.
The instinct with an ageing system is to start again. It is rarely the right call: a rewrite pauses all business value for months, and the second system reliably rediscovers the edge cases the first one had already solved.
The alternative is a phased approach — assess honestly, put testing around what exists, then replace in slices while the system keeps running. Less dramatic, considerably less risky.
Sometimes the assessment does conclude that a rebuild is right. When it does, that is a documented finding rather than a starting assumption.
What you get
- Assessment reportCodebase, data, dependencies, risk areas and a recommended path — with the option we advise against and why.
- Test strategy & suiteAutomated coverage of critical journeys and interfaces, running in the pipeline.
- Modernisation roadmapSequenced slices, each independently deliverable, with the business running throughout.
- Performance baselineMeasured behaviour under realistic load, with the bottlenecks named.
- Release processEnvironments, pipeline, validation gates and tested rollback.
Scope
What this covers.
02
Functional & API testing
Automated coverage of the journeys and interfaces that would hurt most if they broke.
03
Regression & release validation
A suite that makes releases routine, plus the release process around it.
04
Performance checks
Load and response profiling against realistic usage, with the bottlenecks identified rather than guessed.
05
Legacy assessment
An honest read on the codebase, data, dependencies, risk and what it would genuinely cost to change.
06
Phased modernisation
Refactoring, migration, UI renewal, integration layers and platform decomposition — delivered in slices.
Where it fits
The problems this actually solves.
If none of these sound familiar, this is probably not the capability you need — and we would rather point you somewhere more useful.
Every release breaks something unrelated
Regression coverage on the critical paths, so side effects surface before users find them.
Only one person understands the system
Documented architecture, tests that express intended behaviour, and deliberate knowledge transfer.
The platform is slow and nobody knows why
Profiling against realistic load to find the actual bottleneck rather than optimising by intuition.
Upgrading a dependency is too risky to attempt
Test coverage first, then staged upgrades with a rollback path.
An ageing PHP or WordPress build is slow and risky to change
Assessment of the codebase, plugins and dependencies, then staged upgrades — modern Laravel where a framework is warranted, a hardened and properly maintained WordPress where it is not.
A rewrite has been proposed but the case is unclear
A written assessment comparing phased modernisation against rebuild, with cost and risk for each.
Delivery
How we deliver it.
01
Assess
Read the code, the data and the incident history. Establish real risk rather than assumed risk.
02
Stabilise
Put testing and monitoring around what exists, so change becomes measurable.
03
Sequence
Break modernisation into slices that each deliver value and can be stopped between.
04
Replace
Deliver slice by slice, with the old and new coexisting where necessary.
05
Sustain
Maintain coverage, keep dependencies current, and prevent the next legacy build-up.
Technology
What we build it with.
Selected around product goals, integration needs, security requirements, team fit and long-term maintainability — not trends alone.
Testing
- Functional
- API
- Integration
- Regression
- Performance
Modernisation
- Refactoring
- Migration
- UI renewal
- Integration layers
- Decomposition
Platform
- .NET
- Java
- Node.js
- Python
- PHP
- Laravel
- Docker
- CI/CD
Legacy estates
- Legacy PHP
- Laravel upgrades
- WordPress hardening
- Framework migration
Where AI fits
Legacy systems are where AI-assisted comprehension pays off.
Codebase summarisation and test-case generation can accelerate an assessment of an undocumented system — always reviewed by an engineer, never trusted blind.
Explore AI & Intelligent AutomationQuestions
Straight answers.
Modernise, in most cases. A rewrite stops business value for months and tends to rediscover edge cases the existing system already handles. We give you a written comparison rather than a default answer.
Yes — that is most of this work. The assessment phase exists precisely to understand a codebase we did not write before proposing changes to it.
Common. We add coverage to the highest-risk paths first, so change becomes safe incrementally rather than waiting for complete coverage that never arrives.
No. Phased modernisation is specifically designed so the system keeps running and each slice can be delivered independently.
How long does it take you to release a small change?
The answer to that question tells us most of what we need to know. Tell us where the system hurts and we will assess it honestly.