What are greenfield and brownfield applications?

language-agnostic terminology
Svish picture Svish · Sep 22, 2009 · Viewed 40.3k times · Source

I read the following sentence in the Fluent NHibernate wiki:

...; however, for most greenfield applications (and quite a few brownfield ones too) auto mapping will be more than capable.

What are greenfield and brownfield applications?

Answer

Bombe picture Bombe · Sep 22, 2009

Greenfield

in other disciplines like software engineering, a greenfield is also a project which lacks any constraints imposed by prior work. The analogy is to that of construction on greenfield land where there is no need to remodel or demolish an existing structure.

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_project)

Brownfield

Brownfield development is a term commonly used in the IT industry to describe problem spaces needing the development and deployment of new software systems in the immediate presence of existing (legacy) software applications/systems. This implies that any new software architecture must take into account and coexist with live software already in situ.

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownfield_(software_development))

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