Five years ago, a new CIO forcefully ejected the entire enterprise development team of 30 technical staff from Top40 company. Four years later, his replacement requested a software audit - by chance, four senior members of the original team were available...

At the time of leaving, a new release of the million LOC system was performed every month with features added by four development teams following a full regression. Production issues were uncommon, and business users across 100 sites enjoyed the responsiveness of IT to deliver on changes to the platform.

The audit team’s findings are epitomized by the 1431 days since the last successful build.

This talk takes a look at what had happened to the project, the team formed to rehabilitate the project, and the challenges of coming back to a project years later when the world of technology has moved on. Had this once state of the art system now become yet another legacy system? Technology, technical quality, process, people, and politics all tell a story of the fast collapse of a well run IT operation, and the mammoth task of rebuilding it.