The Bloj

~One Paragraph Blog: How scary is the rewrite?

Posted on February 18th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Programming.

Do you work in software engineering? Have you ever heard a coworker say, “I’d do X, but then I’d have to rewrite everything?” Truth is, it’s easier to rewrite everything than make small changes sometimes.

How could I justify something so outlandish? Simple. The difficulty of a change (how many hiccups, how many bugs) depends not so much on its scope as it does on how well planned it is. Inevitably, we underestimate how much planning small changes take, and overestimate when we see big, scary changes. Does this mean rewrite is easy? Of course not. But it’s not impossible, or as costly as we think, and just the opposite is true for minor changes.

*The usual caveats: If you have a problem that can be solved with a small change, I recommend sticking to that before resorting to bigger changes. But once you start seeing so-called small changes multiply, you may have hit the stall point.

1 comment.