Re:Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora Are All Coming to the Wind...
by bluGill on Friday May 12, 2017 @10:57AM
(#14324492)
Sure you get to re-write them, and you are a fool not to. However the rewrite needs to be spread out over 30 years. Note that after 10 years your replacement needs to be rewritten as well.
The trick is figuring out what this the priority. There is some 40 year old software that mostly work: it runs fast enough; it doesn't have many bugs; it doesn't follow best practices that the software world has discovered since; and it rarely needs new features. This code needs to be rewritten but the value just isn't there. There is other code that at only 5 years old needs to be rewritten: it is full of bugs, new features have been tacked onto an architecture that wasn't designed to support it - this software needs to have a large budget given to fixing it in the long run this will save a lot of money. Most projects are somewhere in between, you should give the team a little extra time/budget so that they can keep the maintenance up to do and it will never get much worse.
The trick is figuring out what this the priority. There is some 40 year old software that mostly work: it runs fast enough; it doesn't have many bugs; it doesn't follow best practices that the software world has discovered since; and it rarely needs new features. This code needs to be rewritten but the value just isn't there. There is other code that at only 5 years old needs to be rewritten: it is full of bugs, new features have been tacked onto an architecture that wasn't designed to support it - this software needs to have a large budget given to fixing it in the long run this will save a lot of money. Most projects are somewhere in between, you should give the team a little extra time/budget so that they can keep the maintenance up to do and it will never get much worse.