4 ms·
Ahh, refactoring vs rewriting. All fairly sensible stuff, but while the spirit of the author saying: "If you can’t implement new features in a clean way I clai
by 5hoom 15y ago
Ahh, refactoring vs rewriting.
All fairly sensible stuff, but while the spirit of the author saying:
"If you can’t implement new features in a clean way I claim: You aren’t really able to implement the whole application in a clean way from scratch either"
is noble, there are surely circumstances where the existing system is so broken/incompatible that this claim might not hold up. However, you would hope competent developers are aware that outright binning a working system is a Bad Thing.
- arethuza 15y agoI once worked on a "barely working" application - the original project (which I wasn't involved with) had clearly been a train wreck and it had delivered a tiny proportion of what had originally been promised. It presented the user with a couple of fairly straightforward screens, did some integration with a couple of other systems but had over 6,000 (not a typo) classes and a dependency on just about every acronym in J2EE. This had apparently taken a dev team of 30 or so over a year. It was totally replaced by a much smaller application written in a couple of months by a team of three that provided a sound basis for delivering much more functionality than was originally expected. So sometimes, rarely, chucking away something that barely works is very much the right thing to do.