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.
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