DeWild Studios

Or, in this case, how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Technical Debt

The Problem That Keeps Senior Developers Awake at Night

Let me paint you a picture: You’re staring at a production system from 2022—an Acumatica ERP that’s been humming along, processing invoices, managing inventory, keeping the business alive. It works. Sort of. Mostly. Until it doesn’t. Now, it’s coming to end of life and support is going to be turned off. It needs to be upgraded to 2025. Three years doesn’t sound like much, does it? But in software years, that can be archaeological. And here’s the thing nobody tells you, the scariest part isn’t the upgrade itself. It’s that the business can’t stop. Orders still need processing. Invoices still need sending. The machine has to keep running while you’re rebuilding it. This is the nightmare scenario that turns confident developers into sweaty, coffee-dependent shells of their former selves.

The Temptation of the Big Bang (And Why It’ll Probably Destroy You)

Your first instinct? Rip off the band-aid. Shut everything down for a weekend, upgrade straight from 2021 to 2025, and hope for the best. I get it. I’ve been there. That approach has the same energy as “I’ll just rewrite this entire codebase from scratch.”

Spoiler alert: This is how projects die and business come to a grinding halt.

Here’s what actually happens: You discover that the custom interface you built for inventory management? Deprecated in 2023. The way you handled multi-currency transactions? Completely overhauled in 2024. Those clever workarounds you implemented for shipping calculations? They now conflict with core framework changes. Suddenly your weekend upgrade becomes a three-month death march where nothing works and everyone’s panicking.

I won’t pretend I figured this out through brilliant foresight. I learned it by watching projects implode, by being the person at 2 AM trying to roll back a catastrophic upgrade, by feeling that sick dread when you realize you’ve broken production and you don’t know why.

How to Eat an Elephant Without Choking

The unglamorous truth? You upgrade version by version. 2021.1 to 2021.2. Then to 2022.1. Then 2022.2. And so on, all the way to 2025.

Yes, it’s tedious. Yes, it feels inefficient. Yes, you’ll question your life choices around version 2023.1 when you’re fixing the same authentication bug for the third time.

But here’s what this buys you: control.

Each incremental upgrade is a contained problem. You’re not fighting every change that happened across four years simultaneously—you’re dealing with six months of evolution at a time. When something breaks (and it will), you know exactly which release notes to check. You can test methodically. Most importantly, you can roll back without destroying everything.

Think of it like updating a recipe. You don’t change every ingredient and cooking method at once and hope dinner turns out edible. You adjust the seasoning, taste it, then move to the next change.

Legacy Code and Deprecated Features

Now let’s talk about the part that actually keeps you up at night—the code itself.

Interfaces: A Case Study in Pain

Here’s a real-world example that’ll feel familiar if you’ve done this dance: You’ve got custom interfaces handling data synchronization between Acumatica and external systems. Maybe it’s pulling customer data from Salesforce, or pushing order information to a warehouse management system.

In 2021, you implemented PXProjectionAttributes using interfaces and some clever event handlers. It worked beautifully. You felt like a genius.

Fast forward to 2024: those projections are deprecated. The most issue developers face – not being able to access data that was previously available. This is cause for concern, retrieving data is easy, ensuring the data is correct is the tricky part.

My Approach to Survival:

1. Panic Make a beverage and contemplate life while browsing Seek. Breathe and get at it.
2. Isolate and identify. Before you touch anything, map out what’s deprecated and what isn’t. Run the deprecation warnings. Read the release notes. Create a spreadsheet if you have to. Make the invisible visible.
3. Create adapter patterns. Don’t rewrite your entire graph or DAC layer immediately. Build adapters that wrap your old code and translate it to the new patterns. Think of it as a translator standing between your legacy code and the new framework. It’s not elegant, but it buys you time and stability.
4. Test in isolation. Spin up a development environment for the version. Clone your production data (with settings). Test each step independently. This is where you discover that your clever caching mechanism breaks and that PXViolation error is not actually a violation.
5. Refactor incrementally. Once you’ve got adapters in place and everything’s working, then you start the proper refactor. One interface at a time. One method at a time. Test constantly. This is meditation through code—slow, deliberate, slightly boring, but ultimately enlightening.

The real-world impact – That manufacturing company can now integrate with their new supplier portal because you upgraded the API framework. The finance team can finally use the improved reporting features from 2025. The system no longer throws mysterious errors every third Tuesday because you fixed those deprecated interfaces.

And yeah, you’ve accumulated new technical debt along the way. Those adapter patterns? They’ll need replacing eventually. That’s fine. That’s how this works. You solve the problems in front of you, you learn, you move forward.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

Upgrading legacy systems isn’t about brilliant architecture or perfect code. It’s about patience, systematic thinking, and accepting that the path forward is through boring, incremental work. 2 weeks of it in some cases.

Break the problem into pieces small enough that they’re not terrifying. Test everything. Keep the business running. Document what you learn. And when you hit a new version in 2026.1 and everything feels impossible, remember: the only way out is through, one version at a time.

I’m still learning this at points. Still making mistakes. Still finding better ways to handle deprecated features and manage upgrades. I’m not pretending I have it all figured out. This is just what’s worked for me, shared in case it helps you avoid some of the painful lessons I learned the hard way.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a 2026 upgrade to start planning. Because the work never really ends—it just evolves.

What’s your nightmare legacy upgrade story? I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Misery loves company, and sometimes shared suffering is the best teacher.