How did the rewrite go? That always scares the crap out of me.
Re:Programmer as Market
by wccrawford on Sunday February 20, 2011 @04:41PM
(#2243193)
It had a ridiculous deadline, but it actually seemed to be going well. The developers (myself included) were more interested in clean, maintainable code than hitting the deadline, so everything was looking really nice. Most of the business logic had been done (and unit tested, of course) and already had another team talking about how they could use it in their code.
Unfortunately, I left the company at that point, so I won't get to see how the rest of the rewrite goes.
The first startup I worked for had really ugly code... That worked. And for the first couple years, I wrote slightly nicer code that also worked. Eventually, the product matured enough, and had enough customers, that it was time to get serious about clean code. I started adding unit tests and cleaning things up. It was almost impossible to get everyone else on board because they were used to doing things the 'quick' way for so long.
But eventually it became unbearable to continue as we had. The whole company got on board with unit tests, then scrum, and eventually ordered a complete rewrite of the system with clean, maintainable code.
I didn't actually agree with the last bit. I thought incremental changes were best for most of it, and a complete rewrite for other pieces would be the best.
The point is, they started out quick and dirty, launched, made some money, and then started cleaning up. It enabled them to seize the market and hold onto it, despite competitors that came along and threw millions of dollars into developing a competing product.
One size does not fit all.