Technical Project Discovery Checklist

Recently I've had to delve into a lot of legacy products to understand how we can migrate them to a newer, more modern stack. This is something I've done a number of times throughout my career under the broad banner of digital transformation. Systems are always getting older and harder to maintain. The technologies underpinning them fall out of favour or simply become unsupportable. Inspired by "The Checklist Manifesto" — a book I read years ago — I wanted to standardise my approach to this kind of work. A consistent checklist not only gives you a repeatable process but also reduces the chance of missing something important. So here's what I use when conducting technical project discovery. My assumption here is that you're coming in cold — you aren't familiar with any of the systems in use, but you need to understand them well enough to plan a migration. 1. Identify all the systems Start at a high level and map everything out. Use a C4 model if you can. For each system, capture what…