>cabin for a weekend, and rewrote the whole frontend. The problems with big bang rewrites don't manifest in rewrites that take 2-3 days. Even if your rewrite b

>cabin for a weekend, and rewrote the whole frontend. The problems with big bang rewrites don't manifest in rewrites that take 2-3 days. Even if your rewrite burns a full week, if it fails you've only lost a week. Rewrites are problematic when they are expected to take months or longer. That's when the amount of code is high, the complexity is high, and the estimates tend to be bad. Losing many months of forward progress to chase a rewrite can kill a company. If a single lost week can kill your company, you're probably doomed anyway. I've successfully done the "big bang" rewrite myself for things that needed a week or so of rewriting. I don't believe for a moment that this experience is relevant for large scale rewrites. I've only ever seen those fail spectacularly. Anyone who tells you that a 1-week rewrite is never appropriate is just cargo culting and probably not worth listening to in general. A one week rewrite to avoid weeks of refactoring can be a very good tradeoff. A one year rewrite on the other hand is likely to end in disaster, not least because it guarantees a year of lost forward progress.