Best Practices for Application retirement

Hey Steve,
How's it going?

I like all the feedback we've already seen from the community, but I have to throw in my $0.02.

I expect you've got change management procedures (the same you follow when you add or update an application).
One way to approach this is to treat it foremost as a change, rather than "retirement" of an application.

Looking at this activity through the lens of change, a number of guiding principles are likely to present themselves.
For example, clarify the functional requirements of the change.
If those requirements include access to historical application or process data for given period of time, that gives you some guidance regarding whether or not to think about deleting instances or other data.

Start work on your change, based on the new functional requirements, in your development environment, (such as revoking permissions), and then test extensively. Then promote those changes up through your higher environments and continue to test.

Deletion of Appian objects is a risky proposition. Sure, you could do it. But there might be gold in them hills.
A good rule of thumb is to add "[DEPRECATED]" to the names of the folders that contain the rules and processes you'd like to delete. You can label groups as deprecated as well, if it makes sense.

If your application includes documents folders, ensure that the security is set properly on those as well.

Hey Steve,
How's it going?

I like all the feedback we've already seen from the community, but I have to throw in my $0.02.

I expect you've got change management procedures (the same you follow when you add or update an application).
One way to approach this is to treat it foremost as a change, rather than "retirement" of an application.

Looking at this activity through the lens of change, a number of guiding principles are likely to present themselves.
For example, clarify the functional requirements of the change.
If those requirements include access to historical application or process data for given period of time, that gives you some guidance regarding whether or not to think about deleting instances or other data.

Start work on your change, based on the new functional requirements, in your development environment, (such as revoking permissions), and then test extensively. Then promote those changes up through your higher environments and continue to test.

Deletion of Appian objects is a risky proposition. Sure, you could do it. But there might be gold in them hills.
A good rule of thumb is to add "[DEPRECATED]" to the names of the folders that contain the rules and processes you'd like to delete. You can label groups as deprecated as well, if it makes sense.

If your application includes documents folders, ensure that the security is set properly on those as well.