If I Could Wave a Magic Wand
We often talk about rewriting code and almost as often talk about whether big rewrites are even a good idea. Joel Spolsky writes a particularly harrowing story of how netscape rewrote their entire codebase and in so doing perhaps doomed their chances of recovery. In summary, here are some key things you need to keep in mind when considering to rewrite something.
If uncertainty is high, these can all be good reasons to abstain from a rewrite. Instead, focusing on an iterative approach is going to be better. I find that usually (good) programmers enter a new project with idealistic dreams of ripping out the walls; this could be done differently, that could be removed entirely, and so on. Then, later, the longer they stay the more those walls seem familiar, and the idea of changing everything becomes instead a distant memory. In most mature teams, this isn’t that much of an argument. The codebase is big and daunting, the work already hard and frustrating. Why would we even consider a rewrite, and give ourselves more of the same?
I like listening to Adam Savage talk about how he works. He isn’t a software engineer, and yet I find his thoughts seem so easily transferable to our profession. He mentions the idea of remodeling a room and how people “see what is, and what is is an anchor for what can be.” This anchor really can stop you from being able to see a cleaner, better solution. Nothing is perfect, but it still works, and we shouldn’t fix what ain’t broken right? Well, no, but here’s the idea: We should imagine we had a magic wand that could build exactly what we want and ask ourselves roughly what that would look like.
