Monday, March 16, 2009

The Green-field is always Greener

Maintaining software is harder than writing it. That's why groups often decide that a complete rewrite is going to be better than rearchitecting or even just maintaining their existing system. Management loves green-field projects because they're a mythical utopia that will provide an opportunity to get everything they want this time.

Ref The Old "Migrate the App" Silliness via But at what cost?

Couple this with the force of "what I don't understand must be broken" and you've often got a recipe for disaster.

What needs to change to make a system better are the tools, techniques, and especially the people. Give the same programmer a different technology and yes you'll get a different app (because the programmer is more experienced now), but you'll also get 80% of the same results.

1 Comments:

Blogger turboladen said...

I can think of a couple re-writes that I'd like to see...

11:41 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home