

The Big Switch: How We Rebuilt Wanelo from Scratch and Lived to Tell About It - thinker
http://blog.wanelo.com/post/31534906083/the-big-switch-how-we-rebuilt-wanelo-from-scratch-and

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tdg
First of all, congratulations on what seems to be a very well executed
rewrite.

That being said, it will be interesting to see how this compares to all the
stories about dangers of rewriting. I definitely want to see an update in a
few months about the results.

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jspiral
The facts of this case seem to tilt things in favor of a rewrite more than
other other examples I've seen. \- reasonable confidence that large portions
of the current codebase are truly dead \- lack of tests in the existing
codebase \- a fair amount of real world experience showing higher productivity
in rails over java web stacks \- a problem domain that the decision makers can
actually wrap their heads around (vs a legacy system that manages commercial
mortgage repackaging or something where there is no one person who actually
understands everything important that the system does) \- a new development
team who's going to have learning curve anyway

this seems like about the perfect situation for starting over. congrats!

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m104
Awesome! It's nice to read accounts like this from those who have braved the
task and successfully completed a ground-up rewrite.

Looking ahead, I can see the formation of dedicated development teams who
specialize in rewriting working-but-just-barely apps completely from scratch.
As those teams get better at doing this kind of work (and their clients
prosper!), more companies will start to seriously consider the re-write
option. Who knows, a whole industry could form just for app rewrites.

~~~
siberianfruit
I'd say that if anything could be formalized as a set of skills or as a
process that could be applied to multiple projects, it would be extreme
discipline around what gets built. For example, we were fairly militant about
cutting features and keeping things as simple as possible, which is always
easier said than done.

Also, this rewrite wouldn't be possible without each team member's personal
productivity which was also aided by pairing. Curiously, we worked fairly
regular days (although some nights and weekends, but those were by personal
choice).

