Re:Startup Suicide -- Rewriting the Code
by kemiller on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @05:53PM
(#2141298)
Depends on what you mean by stable, and what you mean by rewrite. If your end result is buggy and unstable, it's sometimes worth using it as a rough draft and starting over. Ground up rewrites in a successful environment (which was the subject of the article) are usually wrong.
Planned, incremental refactoring or re-architecture can be quite beneficial if done right.
Rewriting stable production code, on the other hand, is almost always a mistake.