The Great Rewrite

Should you ever rewrite your software from scratch? As a technical advisor (1), there is one question that I get asked by clients every so often. Is the state of the software so bad that it needs to be rewritten from scratch? It’s easy to fool oneself into thinking it might be a simple task. Just build a new thing that does what the old one did, right? Wrong. If you Joel Spolsky’s legendary essay Things You Should Never Do (2), you get the sense that you should never do a complete rewrite. However, if you’ve been working with mobile apps long enough, you will most likely have heard something completely different. “Always Rewrite the App Every 3-5 years”, was a common mantra in the mobile world. As you might have guessed by now, the answer is…