Yeah - that's a really hard change. For anyone dealing with a legacy system, I always recommend Mike Feathers' book on "working effectively with legacy code". H

Yeah - that's a really hard change. For anyone dealing with a legacy system, I always recommend Mike Feathers' book on "working effectively with legacy code". He talks about lots of patterns for dealing with this. I'd probably see if I could start to break off a piece of a system, bring in a consultant or new dev for a couple of months, pair them with one of your team and rotate every few weeks. You won't lose too much capacity in terms of working on the core system and you'll get a chance to start to slowly introduce members of your team to new best practices. Sometimes single page web apps can help with some of this as you can just drop in backbone on a page or two and use it to federate data from both your main app and a new app you're adding some functionality to. You probably will end up losing half the team over time, but honestly if they put up with the current state of affairs for so long, that might not end up being a bad long term outcome. Just don't big bang any changes - cultural or technical. And try to ignite curiosity rather than "mandating innovation"