Friday, August 01, 2014

Should you ever embark on a complete rewrite?

I embarked on V2 of my project SimpleDBM about 3 years back. Finally last month I closed down the V2 branch and merged the useful stuff back into the main branch.

V2 was going to be a major refactoring of the system. That is what killed it - because any major refactoring is large amount of effort. One of the best write ups on why no one should ever do this is this article at Joel on Software.

That doesn't mean one should not refactor software - it is just that small incremental changes that are immediately merged and tested with the mainline is the better way to do it.

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