arthur.wiebe

I know from personal experience and from watching others that many times when building software, after awhile it gets bloated and messy. Things get disorganized and you feel like starting over. And many times that’s what we do.

But what’s the best thing to do? I’ve done two major rewrites of software so far; And once I tried to do a rewrite but ended up just improving what I had because of time restraints.

What are the advantages of redoing (rewriting) your software rather than improving it?

1. You get to start from scratch and use your previous experience to build something with a much better foundation.
2. You can reorganize without breakage.

The disadvantages include:

1. It takes a lot more time.
2. You need to work on two release branches simultaneously.
3. Requires more resources.

When improving the advantages are:

1. You can do it as you have the time.
2. There is no need to redo parts that have no faults.
3. Instead of writing something new from scratch, you can refine what’s there resulting in code without the lot of bugs.

And disadvantages include:

1. It’s easier to say I’ll get to it later and leave it as is.
2. Some things might be impossible to improve without major reconstruction.

But overall I believe the better choice in most cases is to improve. Except in those cases where you need it in another language or it requires some major code reconstruction.

Why I wrote this I don’t know. But maybe it’ll help someone. It’s like this in life a lot of times too. People say, starting this year I’m going to turn my life around! Usually it doesn’t work that way. They start but end up turning back because it’s too difficult.
Meanwhile if we turn our life around gradually, it is much easier to do, and usually is more successful.
But even then we can’t do it ourselves. Only through the power of Jesus Christ can we do anything of worth. Much in the same way, only if we have the resources can we improve or redo software.
But the power Christ gives is enough to redo our life in a split second. Like redoing software, it starts at the heart and works it’s way outward. And the result is amazing.