Glossary
Definitions of the key terms you will see in our reports.
- Legacy software
- Software still in active use that runs on outdated technology, no longer receives vendor support, or can be maintained by only a few developers. Not necessarily 'bad' — but the risk to the business grows every year.
- Technical debt
- The downstream cost of shortcuts taken to ship faster earlier. Over time, those compromises slow every change. Technical debt is not a mistake — it becomes a problem only when nobody pays it down systematically.
- Refactoring
- Reorganising existing code without changing its external behaviour. Goal: clearer, safer, more maintainable code. Refactoring is not a rewrite — all functionality is preserved.
- Rewrite
- Partial or full re-implementation of a system, often onto a different stack. Higher risk than refactoring, but a better long-term outcome when the legacy base is too exhausted.
- Strangler Fig pattern
- An incremental modernization strategy: new modules sit beside the legacy system and gradually replace functionality until the legacy is gone. Lower risk than a 'big bang' rewrite.
- Business logic
- The rules that describe how your company makes decisions inside the software. In legacy systems, business logic is typically scattered across hundreds of files and undocumented. Extracting it is the most important step in any rewrite.
- AI coding agent
- Software tools that use large language models (LLMs) to read, write, and refactor code. They do not replace developers — they dramatically accelerate them.
- Claude Code
- Anthropic's agentic tool for working across full codebases. The primary tool Renovio uses for analysis and rewriting.
- OpenRewrite / Moderne
- A deterministic system for automatically applying refactorings in Java and Spring projects. Renovio uses it for the mechanical parts of a migration that don't need AI.
- Semgrep
- A pattern-based code search tool with auto-fix. Renovio uses it in the security portion of the analysis.
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