Studies have shown (see McConnell's *Code Complete for citations) that bugs are far new likely to recur in previously buggy code than in code not yet found to b

Studies have shown (see McConnell's *Code Complete for citations) that bugs are far new likely to recur in previously buggy code than in code not yet found to be buggy. Since so much time in development is spent in testing and debugging, it's not at all unreasonable (based on studies or on my personal experience) to claim that it's easier or better or faster to rewrite code rather than try to fix it. This dovetails quite reasonably with Brooks' claim that we should plan to throw one away, because we will anyway.