[arctangent]

I don't think this advice fits well with agile approaches to building software.

I've spent about three years (on and off) building a Django application for a team where I work and, over time, new functionality has been bolted on as and when the needs of the team changed. We've also gone through one fairly major model change that seriously wrecked the sense of symmetry in the v1.0 I delivered all those years ago.

A bit later this year I will be making a whole lot more changes to the application and I've decided that rather than going from a v1.6 to a v1.7 this is a great time to throw away the majority of the code and re-build from the ground up so that the v2.0 is properly architected to meet the needs that exist today.

It's going to be a lot of work but I think it's worth it in terms of making new features easier to add and reducing the maintenance burden associated with a structure that has become overburdened with technical debt.

[mnutt]

Agile means different things to different people, but to me "the big rewrite" sounds pretty un-agile. You end up making a lot of architecture decisions all at once and go a long time between working releases.

If your business needs have completely changed then it might be worth it, but at that point it's no longer "the big rewrite" but instead just writing a new application. (that isn't required to fulfill the requirements of the old app)