Tightly coupled codebases built over decades resist change, making even minor updates risky and time-consuming.
Government systems must meet strict data-sovereignty, audit-trail, and accessibility standards that limit technology choices.
Critical system knowledge resides with a few individuals or external vendors, creating fragile dependencies and high switching costs.
Mission-critical public services cannot tolerate outages during migration, requiring careful parallel-run and cutover strategies.
12-24 months
Traditional big-bang rewrite approach
3-6 months
Incremental strangler-fig migration