Technical debt will never go away unless you confront it directly. If you put it off for too long you simply cannot recover it. Yes a complete rewrite is painfu

Technical debt will never go away unless you confront it directly. If you put it off for too long you simply cannot recover it. Yes a complete rewrite is painful, and can kill you, but so will technical debt. By the time you're drowning in it, there really isn't any easy escape, if there is one. The cost to fix is an investment, it pays off over time, so any refactorization work will eventually pay off, it's just a matter of whether you can pay the cost. Eventually the cost will be so big that a full rewrite will be cheaper. If Netscape didn't do a rewrite, their technical debt would have stayed and they would have died a slow painful death. The real worst mistake you can make is having a policy of putting off technical debt. I've seen it kill companies, and for them, it's a permanent death with no hope of a revival.