Dangerous to Start Over

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 16:01:34 GMT

clipped by: asardar
clipper's remarks: Joel hits it again about why one needs to be careful if presented with the idea of restarting from scratch. Most times it will be a losing proposition.

Clip Source: www.joelonsoftware.com

Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:

It's harder to read code than to write it.

It's important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don't even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don't actually have "more experience". You're just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren't in the original version.

Tags: software development

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Dangerous to Start Over