In the first article of this series, we discussed How Much Does It Cost to Upgrade Rails based on our historical data working on over 100 upgrade projects. In this article we’ll discuss how to minimize the cost once you’ve decided to move forward on an upgrade so your team can continue to focus on valuable product feature or roadmap work.

Working with our team of experts to upgrade your Rails application allows you to stay compliant and take advantage of the benefits and security updates of a supported version, while also letting your team focus on revenue-generating initiatives. Still, it can be a significant investment, especially, as we covered in the previous post, if your project requires a high level of manual QA, for example.

There are, however, ways to reduce the time (and therefore cost) it takes to upgrade your Rails application when working with an external team. In this article, we’ll cover a few different strategies. Does it mean you can’t upgrade unless you do all of this? No, it doesn’t. Being an Agile team allows us to adapt to your process and workflow and work with any team to get the upgrade done. However, employing at least one of these strategies can make your upgrade more cost-effective.

Upgrading a legacy Rails application often presents challenges, especially when migrating from Rails 4 to 5.

One significant evolution lies within the ActionController::Parameters class, Rails 5 removes the Hash inheritance which breaks application behavior. If you want to be prepared for that, keep reading this post.

You’ve decided you need to prioritize upgrading Rails. Maybe it’s a compliance issue, you’re running a version that has reached EOL and need to upgrade to a more current one. Maybe you want to benefit from some of the new features more recent versions provide. Maybe you’ve noticed the old Rails version is getting in the way of your team’s productivity. Or maybe it’s something else.

Whatever the motivation may be, upgrading Rails can be a significant effort. As such, one of the key things to consider is how expensive will it be to get you from your current version to your target version. Regardless of whether you plan to handle the upgrade in house or outsource, how long it’ll take and, therefore, how much it’ll cost, are the key questions to answer.

We have invested more than 30,000 hours in total in upgrading Rails applications, having completed more than 100 upgrade projects. In this article, we’ll leverage our historical data and what we learned to help you answer this question: How much will this cost?

There have been a lot of changes over the years in asset management for Ruby on Rails applications. The main question, after all the madness, is… “What should I do if I need to upgrade my Rails application?”

In this article we will talk about the options we have for each version jump.

Zeitwerk is the code autoloader and reloader that was integrated with Rails 6. Beginning in Rails 7, it will be the only codeloader option. As a result, upgrading to Zeitwerk will be an important step in getting your application ready for the next version of Rails. In this article, we’ll talk about upgrading your Rails 6 application from classic to zeitwerk mode.

One of the steps we recommend taking when doing an upgrade for any Rails version is to dual boot the application with your current Rails version and your next rails version.

This is important because it allows you to quickly run the test suite for both versions, having dual booting available allows you to debug and also revert to your current version in a much simpler fashion.

However, sometimes changes that you make for the new version of Rails may not be compatible with your current version of Rails. This means that you will need to use a few different techniques to get both versions to be able to use the dual booting and run smoothly.

Welcome to our series of Rails upgrade miniguides. Here you’ll find links to all of the relevant posts to help with an upgrade.

Sometimes you will be caught between a rock and a hard place. For example: You really need to upgrade your Rails application because Heroku is discontinuing your stack in two weeks so you don’t have the time to write an entire test suite.

Sometimes the situation will be that your boss really needs you to upgrade Ruby or Rails to use a version that gets security updates and they won’t allow you to write tests beforehand.

This article will explain how to ship a Rails upgrade project without a test suite. If your application has no tests, you will learn how to upgrade without having to write tests first.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to prepare your Ruby on Rails application for working on an upgrade.

If you’re a developer you know the reasons why you should be using the latest Rails framework. You understand the implications of performance gains, dependency issues and unsupported versions.

But these big picture benefits get lost in translation when talking to non-technical executives. What they need to know is the business case for an upgrade, how the work will translate into increased revenue.

So, here is an article to use or forward to communicate why an upgrade should be a priority. We also wrote an article on the more technical reasons if you are interested.