The CTO's Guide to Eliminating Engineering 'Archaeology' Shifts

Your senior engineers are no longer developers; they are archaeologists. In the average enterprise, 70% of the engineering lifecycle is spent excavating layers of undocumented legacy code rather than shipping new value. This "archaeology shift"—the period where high-salaried talent manually traces logic through 20-year-old black boxes—is the single greatest tax on corporate innovation.

TL;DR: Modernization fails because of discovery gaps, not coding ability; visual reverse engineering with Replay collapses the discovery phase from months to days, saving 70% of the total modernization timeline.

The $3.6 Trillion Debt: Why Archaeology is Killing Your Velocity#

The global technical debt bubble has reached $3.6 trillion, and the interest is paid in engineering hours. When a CTO mandates a "modernization initiative," the clock doesn't start at the first line of new code. It starts with six months of "discovery"—a polite term for engineers staring at legacy Java, Delphi, or COBOL screens trying to figure out what the business logic actually is.

The data is damning: 67% of legacy systems lack any meaningful documentation. This forces teams into a "Big Bang" rewrite strategy that carries a 70% failure rate. When you ask a team to rewrite a system they don't understand, you aren't building a bridge; you're guessing where the other side of the river is.

The Anatomy of the Manual Extraction Bottleneck#

Currently, the industry standard for modernization follows a grueling, manual path:

1. •Manual Audit: Sifting through repos to find the "source of truth."
2. •Screen Mapping: Spending an average of 40 hours per screen to document UI states and edge cases.
3. •Logic Reverse Engineering: Guessing API contracts based on intercepted network traffic.
4. •The Rewrite: Building from scratch and hoping the "parity" matches.

This process takes 18 to 24 months for a standard enterprise application. By the time the new system is ready, the business requirements have already shifted.

The CTO's Guide to Modernization Strategies#

Choosing the right path depends on your risk tolerance and the "opacity" of your legacy system. Most enterprises default to the Strangler Fig pattern, but without visual extraction, even that becomes a decade-long slog.

💰 ROI Insight: Manual screen documentation takes ~40 hours per screen. Replay reduces this to ~4 hours by using video as the source of truth for component generation.

Visual Reverse Engineering: The End of "Black Box" Systems#

The fundamental shift offered by Replay is the transition from code-first discovery to workflow-first extraction. Instead of reading 100,000 lines of spaghetti code, you record a real user performing a business workflow.

Replay captures the DOM states, the network calls, and the underlying logic, then uses its AI Automation Suite to generate clean, documented React components and API contracts. You aren't rewriting; you're extracting the "soul" of the application into a modern stack.

From Video to Production-Ready React#

When Replay records a session, it doesn't just take a screenshot. It builds a technical blueprint. It identifies the Design System (Library), maps the architecture (Flows), and provides a functional editor (Blueprints) to refine the output.

typescript
// Example: Replay-Generated Component from a Legacy Financial Portal
// This was extracted from a 15-year-old JSP screen in minutes.

import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';
import { Button, Input, Table, Alert } from '@/components/ui'; // Preserves Design System
import { legacyApiProvider } from '@/api/legacy-bridge';

interface AccountProps {
  accountId: string;
  onTransactionComplete: (id: string) => void;
}

/**
 * @generated Extracted from Workflow: "Quarterly Tax Reconciliation"
 * @source_legacy_path /admin/finance/tax_v2.jsp
 * @logic_preserved Validation rules for 401k edge cases preserved from original recording.
 */
export const TaxReconciliationForm: React.FC<AccountProps> = ({ accountId, onTransactionComplete }) => {
  const [loading, setLoading] = useState(false);
  const [data, setData] = useState<any>(null);

  // Replay identified this specific API contract from network interception
  const handleSubmit = async (formData: any) => {
    setLoading(true);
    try {
      const response = await legacyApiProvider.post('/api/v1/reconcile', formData);
      if (response.status === 200) onTransactionComplete(response.id);
    } catch (err) {
      console.error("Legacy Bridge Error:", err);
    } finally {
      setLoading(false);
    }
  };

  return (
    <div className="p-6 bg-white rounded-lg shadow-md">
      <h2 className="text-xl font-bold mb-4">Reconciliation Module</h2>
      {/* UI structure mirrored exactly from the recorded legacy workflow */}
      <form onSubmit={handleSubmit}>
        <Input label="Tax ID" name="taxId" required />
        <Table data={data?.transactions} />
        <Button type="submit" disabled={loading}>
          {loading ? 'Processing...' : 'Confirm Reconciliation'}
        </Button>
      </form>
    </div>
  );
};

⚠️ Warning: Attempting to modernize without an automated audit of your technical debt leads to "Debt Compounding"—where you simply move old bugs into a new framework.

The 4-Step Framework for Visual Modernization#

If you are a CTO looking to eliminate archaeology shifts, you need a repeatable pipeline. Here is how Replay structures the transition:

Step 1: Visual Assessment & Audit#

Before writing code, use Replay to perform a Technical Debt Audit. By recording the most critical 20% of your app (which usually handles 80% of the value), the platform identifies redundant logic and undocumented API dependencies.

Step 2: Workflow Recording#

Have your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) run through their daily tasks. Replay records these sessions, capturing the "as-is" state of the business logic. This eliminates the need for engineers to interview SMEs for weeks on end.

Step 3: Component & Contract Extraction#

The Replay AI Automation Suite processes the recordings to generate:

• •API Contracts: (Swagger/OpenAPI specs) derived from real-world usage.
• •React Components: Clean, modular code that matches your modern design system.
• •E2E Tests: Automatically generated Playwright or Cypress tests based on the recorded user path.

yaml
# Generated API Contract from Replay Extraction
openapi: 3.0.0
info:
  title: Legacy Insurance Claims API
  version: 1.0.0
paths:
  /claims/validate:
    post:
      summary: Extracted from "Claim Submission" workflow
      parameters:
        - name: claim_id
          in: query
          required: true
          schema:
            type: string
      responses:
        '200':
          description: Validation successful
          content:
            application/json:
              schema:
                $ref: '#/components/schemas/ValidationResult'

Step 4: Incremental Integration#

Using the generated components and contracts, you can begin the "Strangler" process. Replace one screen at a time. Because the new React components look and behave exactly like the old ones (but with modern performance), user friction is near zero.

Solving the "Regulated Industry" Problem#

For CTOs in Financial Services, Healthcare, or Government, "cloud-only" tools are a non-starter. Modernization often stalls because the tools required to understand the code can't be used on sensitive data.

Replay was built for these environments:

• •SOC2 & HIPAA Ready: Data handling that meets the strictest compliance standards.
• •On-Premise Availability: Run the extraction engine entirely within your own firewall.
• •PII Scrubbing: Automated masking of sensitive user data during the recording and extraction phase.

💡 Pro Tip: Use the "Blueprints" feature to set global rules for PII handling before starting your first extraction project.

The Future: From Archaeology to Architecture#

The goal of a CTO shouldn't be to manage a rewrite; it should be to manage an evolution. When you eliminate the archaeology shift, you free up your most expensive assets—your senior engineers—to focus on architecture.

Instead of figuring out how a 2004 SOAP service works, they can spend their time optimizing the new microservices architecture, improving security posture, and integrating AI capabilities that provide a competitive edge.

Key Metrics to Track Your Success#

• •Time to First Screen: How long from project kick-off to a functional React version of a legacy screen? (Target: < 5 days).
• •Documentation Coverage: Percentage of legacy workflows that have an associated API contract and E2E test. (Target: > 90%).
• •Developer Velocity: The ratio of "new feature" tickets vs. "legacy investigation" tickets.

Frequently Asked Questions#

How long does legacy extraction take with Replay?#

While a manual rewrite of a complex module typically takes 3-6 months, Replay users generally see a functional React extraction in 2-8 weeks. The initial "Visual Audit" of an entire application can be completed in a matter of days.

What about business logic preservation?#

Replay doesn't just copy the UI; it captures the state transitions and data flow. By observing how the legacy system responds to specific inputs during recording, Replay generates logic that mirrors the original behavior, ensuring 1:1 parity without needing to read the original source code.

Does this replace my developers?#

No. It replaces the "grunt work" of discovery. Your developers are still needed to integrate the generated components, manage state across the new application, and refine the architecture. Replay gives them a 70% head start.

Which frameworks does Replay support?#

Replay is optimized for generating React components (Typescript) and can output API contracts in OpenAPI/Swagger formats. It can extract from almost any web-based legacy system, including those built on JSP, ASP.NET, Delphi (Web), and older versions of Angular/Vue.

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Ready to modernize without rewriting? Book a pilot with Replay - see your legacy screen extracted live during the call.