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People suggest rewriting little-by-little. Does that really work in practice? And why would one do it? Why not let that business rot-in-place so to speak, while
by intrasight 4y ago
People suggest rewriting little-by-little. Does that really work in practice? And why would one do it? Why not let that business rot-in-place so to speak, while building a new business on a new platform to "compete" with it?
I worked for a company early in my career that sold a $1500 piece of software and had revenue of $15 million. When I was there, the head could was 70. Ten years later the head count is two - one engineer and one person to take the orders. And revenue was still a couple million. A classic "rot-in-place" situation.
- carso 4y agoRewriting little by little just means: each time you make a change, leave the source base at least a little better than you found it. Leave a few comments about the thing you reverse engineered. Delete a little dead code. Eventually you get the confidence to move from the lowest hanging fruit to deeper refactoring. You do it because that approach may be the best you can do with a rotten source base within your time and resource constraints,
- intrasight 4y agoHonestly, that sounds like making bad code even worse.
- majikandy 4y agoApart from the fact they said making the code better each time?
- intrasight 4y agoLOL. Did you read the OP? Code is in PHP.
- majikandy 4y agoYes it works. You eventually get to a place that is “not too bad”, whilst still allowing new features to be developed and the business moving forward.