Refactor vs rewrite (again)

I don't know why I have to blog about this.  It depresses me and reflects poorly on our entire industry.  It is 2014!  Don't we know better?!?

Apparently not.  I have found myself *several* times in the past month, having to argue against a big rewrite of many thousands of lines of code.  I am amazed and appalled that anyone still thinks this way, after *so* many articles have been written for *so* many years.  Two of my favorites are Joel in the year 2000, and this more recent article that references one of my favorite cartoons (thanks to Lance for introducing me to the cartoon).

One thing that is different from when Joel wrote that blog post 14 years ago is that refactoring software is so much easier now.  It is now *incredibly* easy, in addition to being much safer.

I don’t want to go through the same arguments again, because so many others have done it for me.  Unlike some of the people I have to convince, I am not stupid enough to think that I am the first person faced with this decision, or arrogant enough to dismiss what those hundreds of other people have said.  However, I will offer one small piece of advice.  Often times the refactoring can happen *while* people are designing what the rewritten version is going to look like.  At that point the code will be easy to change and it will be a much simpler process to add the new features.