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In 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 a
by DoubleCluster 14y ago
In 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.