
The Myth of the Software Rewrite - chris-at
http://www.daedtech.com/the-myth-of-the-software-rewrite
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mattlutze
I've had some trouble for a while with idea of "technical debt."

When I'm planning work, I can't look at something and say "I'm taking 10
points of debt with this decision, at an interest rate of 1 pt per month."

By the nature of how tools, libraries, frameworks and languages evolve, our
implementation today will likely be inefficient compared to what we could
build 24 months from now, may not be well-tailored to button up next to a
system we haven't yet purchased/implemented, etc.

As we don't have time machines or crystal balls at our aid to predict what the
future will hold, it's always seemed more helpful to focus more on how to
design a solution for modular improvement. If any given component could
effectively be isolated and then refactored or replaced, you can look at those
issues more as continual improvement.

My experience has been that, if maintaining and continually improving existing
code can be respected in the organization with the same value as new feature
development, a lot of the angst goes away.

