Articles
| Open Access |
DOI: Managing Technical Debt While Migrating Long-Standing Legacy Code to A Modern Tech Stack
Nizamutdinov Ilnar Rakipovich , Full stack developer Belgrade, SerbiaAbstract
The issue of managing technical debt (TD) in large-scale organizations with long-operated legacy systems in 2024–2025 is becoming a key strategic factor, since TD is being transformed into the dominant source of operational risks and loss of market competitiveness. The refusal to pursue consistent modernization leads to the accumulation of TD caused by poor software code quality and inert, obsolete architecture, as a result of which up to 42% of developers’ working time is spent on rework and defect remediation, which causes a critical slowdown in the Time to Market (TTM) metric and deterioration of the user experience (UX), evaluated by Core Web Vitals indicators, in particular Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Time to Interactive (TTI). Under these conditions, the aim of the study is formulated as the development of a holistic integrated approach to strategic TD management, within which incremental architectural migration methods are aligned with quantitatively measurable business outcomes. The empirical and theoretical basis of the study includes a systematic review of current academic publications in the IEEE, ACM, and Scopus databases, as well as an in-depth case study analysis of the migration of a large e-commerce platform to the ReactJS/TypeScript technology stack. The leading methodological foundation is the Strangler Fig Pattern (SFP), which is used for stepwise and controlled reduction of architectural risks during evolutionary system transformation. The results obtained show that the combination of incremental migration with preventive management of code debt through static typing (TypeScript) provides a statistically significant reduction in TTM and a substantial improvement in LCP and TTR metrics, which is in direct correlation with increased conversion and reduced total operating costs. The practical significance of the provisions presented lies in the formation of the concept of a managed digital core, the maintenance of which requires the annual allocation of about 15% of the IT budget to software-autonomous TD remediation, which creates a normative basis for long-term investment planning by CIOs and architectural teams.
Keywords
Technical debt, Legacy systems, Migration, Strangler Fig Pattern, ReactJS, TypeScript, Time to Market (TTM), LCP, Architectural debt, DevOps
References
eLuminous Technologies. (2025, October 10). The strategic guide to technical debt 2025. eLuminous Technologies. https://eluminoustechnologies.com/blog/technical-debt/ (date accessed: November 05, 2025)
Zartis. (2025). Why 2025 is the year tech debt becomes a strategic risk. Zartis. https://www.zartis.com/why-2025-is-the-year-tech-debt-becomes-a-strategic-risk/ (date accessed: December 01, 2025)
Tornhill, A., & Borg, M. (2022, May). Code red: the business impact of code quality-a quantitative study of 39 proprietary production codebases. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Technical Debt (pp. 11-20). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.04374
Accenture. (2024). What is tech debt? Accenture. https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/what-is-tech-debt (date accessed: October 12, 2025)
Accenture. (2024). Build your tech and balance your debt. Accenture. https://www.accenture.com/content/dam/accenture/final/accenture-com/document-3/Accenture-Build-Your-Tech-and-Manage-Your-Debt-2024.pdf (date accessed: November 15, 2025)
Fürnweger, A., Auer, M., & Biffl, S. (2016). Software evolution of legacy systems: A case study of soft-migration. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2016) (pp. 413–424). https://doi.org/10.5220/0005771104130424.
Fairbanks, G. (2020). The pragmatic designer: Ur-technical debt. IEEE Software, 37(4). https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2020.2986613.
Kong. (2025, August 5). The roadmap for reducing technical debt in 2025. Kong Blog – Learning Center. https://konghq.com/blog/learning-center/reducing-technical-debt (date accessed: October 25, 2025)
Li, Z., Avgeriou, P., & Liang, P. (2015). A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management. Journal of Systems and Software, 101, 193–220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2014.12.027.
Technical debt and DevOps: Strategies for managing legacy systems in a CI/CD world. (2023). NeuroQuantology, 21(7). https://doi.org/10.48047/nq.2023.21.7.nq23115.
Product Lab / Rocketech. (n.d.). Time to Market: руководство для стартапа по сокращению времени выхода на рынок. Product Lab. https://productlab.ru/blog/time-to-market (date accessed: October 07, 2025)
MachineHeads. (2025, April 16). Time to Market: что это значит и как с этим работать. MachineHeads. https://machineheads.ru/blog/metrika-time-to-market-derzhite-vremya-pod-kontrolem/ (date accessed: November 10, 2025)
TechDebt 2025. (2025). TechDebt 2025 – International Conference on Technical Debt. conf.researchr.org. https://conf.researchr.org/home/TechDebt-2025 (date accessed: October 30, 2025)
TechDebt Steering Committee. (2025). International Conference on Technical Debt conference series – TechDebt. conf.researchr.org. https://conf.researchr.org/series/TechDebt (date accessed: November 08, 2025)
Microsoft. (2025, February 19). Strangler Fig pattern – Azure Architecture Center. Azure Architecture Center. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/strangler-fig (date accessed: October 22, 2025)
Buxton Consulting. (2024). Reducing technical debt during system migrations: A strategic blueprint. Buxton Consulting. https://buxtonconsulting.com/general/reducing-technical-debt-during-system-migrations-a-strategic-blueprint/ (date accessed: November 25, 2025)
Kirkila, L., Klotina, M., Sproge, J., & Romanovs, A. (2025). Case study review: IT legacy system migration success factors. Conference paper. https://doi.org/10.1109/ITMS67030.2025.11236637.
Sklavenitis, D., & Kalles, D. (2025). A scoping review and assessment framework for technical debt in the development and operation of AI/ML competition platforms. Applied Sciences, 15(13), 7165. https://doi.org/10.3390/app15137165.
Amazon Web Services. (n.d.). The strangler fig pattern – AWS Prescriptive Guidance. AWS Prescriptive Guidance. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/modernization-aspnet-web-services/fig-pattern.html (date accessed: October 14, 2025)
Rafalski, K. (2025, June 30). TypeScript vs React: Which technology is right for you? Netguru Blog. https://www.netguru.com/blog/typescript-vs-react (date accessed: October 28, 2025)
u/OP (Reddit username). (2024). Typescript seems to generate a lot of technical debt.. Am I doing it wrong? Reddit – r/typescript. https://www.reddit.com/r/typescript/comments/1gzpclv/typescript_seems_to_generate_a_lot_of_technical/(date accessed: November 19, 2025)
Conductor. (n.d.). Page speed matters: 10 case studies show why. Conductor Academy. https://www.conductor.com/academy/page-speed-resources/ (date accessed: October 05, 2025)
Paddle. (2024, July 31). Impact of technical debt: How to identify and reduce it. Paddle Resources. https://www.paddle.com/resources/technical-debt (date accessed: November 14, 2025)
Strangler fig pattern. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangler_fig_pattern (date accessed: October 27, 2025)
Slater, T. (2025, December 3). Quantitative analysis of technical debt and pattern violation in large language model architectures. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.04273
Polcode. (2025, January 15). Legacy modernization strategies and approaches for 2025. Polcode Blog. https://polcode.com/resources/blog/legacy-modernization-strategies-approaches/ (date accessed: October 17, 2025)
Bishop, V. III, & Simske, S. J. (2024). Evaluating software contribution quality: Time-to-modification theory. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.11768
Bishop, V. III, & Simske, S. J. (2024, October 15). Evaluating software contribution quality: Time-to-modification theory. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.11768.
Deloitte. (2023). Life after debt: Venture debt funding could grow again in 2024. Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/technology-media-and-telecom-predictions/2024/technology-venture-debt-prediction.html (date accessed: October 16, 2025)
Deloitte. (2023). 2024 technology industry outlook. Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/industries/tmt/articles/technology-industry-outlook.html (date accessed: November 02, 2025)
Saritasa. (2025, August 25). Legacy software modernization in 2025: Survey of 500+ U.S. IT pros. Saritasa Insights. https://www.saritasa.com/insights/legacy-software-modernization-in-2025-survey-of-500-u-s-it-pros (date accessed: November 18, 2025)
Download and View Statistics
Copyright License
Copyright (c) 2026 Nizamutdinov Ilnar Rakipovich
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors retain the copyright of their manuscripts, and all Open Access articles are disseminated under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC-BY), which licenses unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is appropriately cited. The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations.