3 ms·

An incremental refactor is a possibility too, but almost everything must be refactored.

• nostrademons 16y ago
  It's usually better to do things incrementally, even if the whole thing eventually needs to be rewritten and doing it incrementally takes twice as just rewriting from scratch.
  • jtheory 16y ago
    Unless the project is really very small, this is always the case with very few exceptions. Mind you, refactoring can happen at a fairly high level -- if you identify the worst, most broken part of the code and first lock down/simplify its interfaces, you can write a drop-in replacement for that whole chunk. Just remember that if writing your drop-in replacement is going to take weeks (rather than days)... or if your estimate keeps sliding..., you've probably chosen too large a chunk and should slice & dice a bit more. I've had this discussion so many times that now I just have it with myself, and generally only say aloud the correct answer (though it's disappointing). Psychologically, it's a beautiful thing to wipe the slate clean and just do everything fresh from the start. If only this worked as planned more often (and budgets were hefty enough to support "doing it right", and there were not already a user base who actually wanted to keep some of the broken bits because they knew how to use them already, and you didn't have to deal with a few team members who seemed to always be writing more code just like the old stuff, etc etc)...