What can you do if you become the manager of a Perl development team with a huge legacy code-base?

Why has the team and the code not evolved? Is it because the earlier management did not encourage them to learn from the Perl community and bring in better practices?

In many cases I see companies that hope the Perl code base will just keep working, but as technology changes that code-base will also need to change so you will eventually have to invest the time and energy to help the team improve their practices and the code-base.

The best might be a mix of formal training sessions with some ongoing support by an external expert. This person needs to have the collective knowledge from many similarly challenging places, the experience in the open source world, and needs be independent so they will not become part of the regular corporate policy.

I have been sharing Perl-related technical suggestions on my Perl Maven page, so if you are interested in the technical aspects follow that page. However if you are a lead developer or a CTO who runs such a team, you'll be probably more interested in how to set up such environment. I might be able to help.