[m104]

Awesome! It's nice to read accounts like this from those who have braved the task and successfully completed a ground-up rewrite.

Looking ahead, I can see the formation of dedicated development teams who specialize in rewriting working-but-just-barely apps completely from scratch. As those teams get better at doing this kind of work (and their clients prosper!), more companies will start to seriously consider the re-write option. Who knows, a whole industry could form just for app rewrites.

[siberianfruit]

I'd say that if anything could be formalized as a set of skills or as a process that could be applied to multiple projects, it would be extreme discipline around what gets built. For example, we were fairly militant about cutting features and keeping things as simple as possible, which is always easier said than done.

Also, this rewrite wouldn't be possible without each team member's personal productivity which was also aided by pairing. Curiously, we worked fairly regular days (although some nights and weekends, but those were by personal choice).