Examples of outdated software development tools and techologies

Question

I'm writing a paper on software process improvement. As i lack experience from actual software development companies, i made up a company that I'll use for the paper. However I need some examples on outdated tools and technologies they could use so that i have something to improve.

I was thinking of CVS as the revision control system (as SVN and Git seem to be what most are using atm). Waterfall is also something that i'd think you could find in old-fashioned companies.

What tools, techniques, technologies or methodologies could still be used in software developing companies that are more or less obsolete and ineffective?

Answer 1

You may refer this for some outdated technologies\tools which SO users use.

Answer 2

ASP 3.0 is still a used technology but it's now a bit obsolete since it was enhanced with the .NET framework.

Answer 3

Cobol, Borland's Visual Component Library, GOTO and the Singleton Pattern.

Answer 4

Why stop at CVS? They could be using it's predecessor, RCS. I'd also think that CGI-based web apps are somewhat outdated, though I know that many people still use Perl/C/C++ with CGI. Classic ASP, would make the list as well. Going way back, there's Fortran -- though some engineering/physics type apps may still make sense to write in Fortran.

Answer 5

Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft DevStudio 6.0 (e.g., VB6, VC++6, et.al.), MS Access, and Java are all still in use.

Answer 6

There are still, specially in POS, software developed in FoxPro and Clarion under DOS. Or using Visual Basic v3-v6. I even seen, in banking usage, software (better word; macros) written in Access 97.

Every technology is good as long as it serve purposes. Bigger issue is finding engineers to maintain or upgrade that code.

And eventually they will need to rewrite code (if they want to keep customers) so postponing it is not a solution.

In my "outsource time" I still maintain/upgrade POS software written in VB6 even thou I'm professionally using C# for the last 4 yrs now.

Answer 7

• CVS is still used, I think. I wonder why. I guess RCS or even SCCS are no longer used.
• Old OSes: MS-Dos, OS/2, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x (although I still have the latter on an old computer I keep around, and abandoned not so long ago).
• Old browsers: Netscape 4 (and older) is dead. Lot of people wish we can say the same of IE6...
• Old versions of languages: you might still find sites with foo.php3 in the URL, but I hope nobody still develop with it! PHP4 is moribund too. There are plethora of old Basics too (GW-Basic, QuickBasic...). I coded with Visual Basic 4 some years ago...
• Old softwares (often for old OSes...): Illustrator and Photoshop 4 for example; I bought Visual Studio 1.0 (with kg of dead tree documentation!), and so on.

The list can be very long!