Man, I regret not spending more time on the quality of the code at IMVU. I'm not a big fan of rewriting from scratch, but we've basically scaled a prototype in

Man, I regret not spending more time on the quality of the code at IMVU. I'm not a big fan of rewriting from scratch, but we've basically scaled a prototype into a crazy successful business, and it's had some nontrivial effects. For example, product owners now believe that you may as well timebox all refactoring, because you can never get it all. I wrote about the hidden costs of dirty code a while back: http://chadaustin.me/2008/10/10-pitfalls-of-dirty-code/ http://chadaustin.me/2008/10/10-pitfalls-of-dirty-code/ In general I'd prefer to refactor, but you need to _explicitly_ adopt that cultural shift early on.