
Why You Should (Almost) Never Rewrite Your Software - terpua
http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/2596/Why-You-Should-Almost-Never-Rewrite-Your-Software.aspx
======
edw519
When you SHOULD Rewrite Your Software:

When it's a house of cards.

Perhaps I'm a little jaded, but I've built a very nice career rewriting
software that never should have been written in the first place. Of the
existing code I've encountered, at least 95% would never have passed a code
review by me (or anyone else who knew what to look for).

The problem is that we're so committed to pass user acceptance testing that we
never subject the source code and data base design to the same rigors.

I like to think I've seen it all: one and two character variable names that
mean nothing, homemade routines for <sorting, selecting, you name it>, memory
leaks, iterations to nowhere, upward branches to nowhere, data base schemas
that would make M. C. Escher jealous, and on and on and on. Face it, if
programmers were doctors, we'd all be dead.

As a constant victim of the "You Can't Get There From Here Syndrome", I often
tell my clients the same thing, "It's not how soon we get started, it's how
soon we finish AND how capable we are to handle the next revision".

Often rewriting is the last best hope.

