Buzzword: Greenfield Brownfield

It has become common to refer to new development projects as Greenfield. This obviously conjures images of an untouched patch of land with no previous work impeding progress.

Of late, a new term Brownfield  has become trendy to describe the rest of software development. Here there is the obvious contrast with Greenfield in the sense that the ground has been torn up and there is dirt and mud everywhere. But in addition, Brownfield had a prior meaning in commercial real estate. Brownfield referred to a property contaminated by one or more toxins.

In the case of software development, these toxins are prior decisions or implementations which have gone bad or never worked in the first place.