jargon

Architecture & practice·Legacy systems and migration

everything switched over on one weekend, and the rollback plan was a sentence in a document.

Big bang migration

Also calledbig bang rewrite, flag day, cutover

Moving everything from the old system to the new one at a single moment. It is sometimes unavoidable — some data models and some vendors do not allow a gradual path — and it should be recognised as the highest-risk option available, because every problem arrives at once and the rollback window is the same weekend. Where it cannot be avoided, the mitigation is rehearsal: run the cutover against production data more than once before the real one.

Commonly confused with