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My experience is the exact opposite. Trying to make do with horrible code for long periods of time, suffering through bugs in every change... Until we finally
by Peaker 14y ago
My experience is the exact opposite.
Trying to make do with horrible code for long periods of time, suffering through bugs in every change... Until we finally rewrite it. I've never regretted a rewrite, and it has always ended up significantly better than the original (possibly because the horror threshold for rewriting is high, so that's not saying much).
- DoubleCluster 14y agoIn my experience it's quite doable (with a good IDE) to refactor the working but messy code into something maintainable. It might take the same amount of time as a rewrite but you'll still have all the features and corner cases covered. Usually refactoring will be much faster though.
- Peaker 14y agoI disagree. Incremental changes are not always capable of reaching point B from point A. A large, extremely messy code-base can make even trivial changes unsafe, let alone large changes. The effort required not only to figure out what point B is, but also how to safely reach it from point A is immense. Much much harder than a rewrite. However, it is a very good idea to meticulously read the bad old code and write down a list of things it handles -- to make sure none of it is missed in the rewrite.