| Yes, very true. Although I'd like to add some context. > Rewriting involves spending enormous time and resources to at best standstill, and at worst move backwards ( chances are your re-written product will be poorer in features, and initially buggier than your old, stable, battle-tested version). There is plenty of evidence that this has happened in many places and with many companies. A very real scenario that's played out before. I'd say those scenarios were not well-executed. If the outcome of a re-write is "standstill", the re-write is pointless. There is no justification for proceeding with it. However, if "standstill" equates only to user-facing features, chances are the re-write is to address critical issues elsewhere (I get the impression that was the situation with the OP.) In that case, "standstill" doesn't apply. It's simply a matter of deciding whether or not the effort and risk justifies the reward. To my main point, Spolsky's hard-line essentially says re-building your application from scratch is bad strategy. I think it is short-sighted to draw that line. I prefer to exercise judgment and draw on the resources at my disposal for the given situation. I presume many others do as well. |
I don't think Spolsky's position is as "hard-line" as you think it is. I always took it as a very very strong "rule-of-thumb". Every time a rewrite is proposed, it should sound warning bells in all stakeholder. And we're talking about a clean-room rewrite, and not a sub-module rewrite. Spolsky has no problem with rewriting and re-architecturing sub-pieces of an application.
Twitter is a great example of Spolky's philosophy. They had a big architectural and technology problem with Ruby and RoR, but they didn't do a clean-room rewrite with Java. Instead they tackled one sub-component at a time, and now they have something that rocks, but still allowed them to keep the time/code investment they made originally. Just as well, it allowed them to incrementally 'upgrade' their service.