It's not black and white. There are situations where investing in your old code base is throwing good money after bad and there are situations where the old co

It's not black and white. There are situations where investing in your old code base is throwing good money after bad and there are situations where the old code base can be better. You need to make educated decisions not blindly follow rules. Refactoring can be a problem because you're always working towards some local minima. It's a little bit like the decision to renovate an old house vs. raze it and build a new one or buy an old car/boat and repair it. There's a good discussion of various factors here: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6268/when-is-a-big-rewrite-the-answer http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6268/when-is-...