Re:The True Cost of Rewrites
by magicalhippo on Saturday December 15, 2018 @12:55PM
(#18689457)
I should add that you cannot forget the sales side when deciding on doing a rewrite. That is, how are you going to recover the cost of the rewrite?
One of our struggling competitors has, as far as I know, a decent replacement in the form of a rewritten product. But trying to recover the cost they're trying to pitch it as an upgrade. So a license to the new version is much more expensive.
Apparently a lot of clients either do not see the added value over their current version, or, given the higher price, they're considering alternatives such as us.
Doesn't that count as a (successful) rewrite strategy as well?
Re:The True Cost of Rewrites
by magicalhippo on Saturday December 15, 2018 @11:36AM
(#18689044)
Perhaps. For me saying "we're gonna rewrite this program" means a specific effort over a relatively short timescale. Incremental or not (when switching platform for example).
With our approach we will likely have some code that's 10-15 years old now and which still be untouched for another 5-10 years.
I argue that’s not a rewrite because it’s not a fundamental architecture change that requires a huge shift and lift (with the accompanying monolithic deployment critical section and associated risks). It’s just an application of the strangler pattern to do incremental component changes.
Re:The True Cost of Rewrites
by NightlyDev on Sunday December 16, 2018 @04:57AM
(#18692443)
This is the way I prefer to do rewrites too. In the end you usually end up with most code rewritten, without it taking too much time. Then the last bit to get it all rewritten isn't so hard.
We've instead focused replacing parts of the program over time. If we touch some old code that works but needs to be extended for a new feature, we usually rewrite it and bring it up to date as part of implementing that feature. Other times it might be too sensitive and we just modify a small piece of the old code and let it chug along like it has done for over 15 years.
Instead of spending time rewriting the whole shebang we can deliver features, alternatively not having a second team reimplementing everything avoids a huge financial burden.