The Importance of Incremental Migration

When releasing system updates, software engineers often desire existing users to migrate to the updated system. Our experience has been that migration difficulty scales with the difference in functionality between the old system and the new system. If this difference is sufficiently large, the migration task becomes prohibitively difficult for existing consumers. To better incentivize migration, system authors should prioritize providing an incremental migration path to the new system, reducing migration cost and thus improving migration rate. Research efforts should focus on "patterns of incrementality" to assist system designers.