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Software Engineering

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    +1 for refactor approach. Lots of times there's not enough time or manhours to rewrite AND maintain the existing system. Commented Sep 22, 2010 at 12:20
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    @John: As an executive, I would have a very hard time greenlighting a rewrite on an application that my sales team has yet to get a customer for. In all honesty, I'd give it a certain amount of time, and then decide what to do. If interest isn't there, I'd trash the whole thing and pick something else to do. Commented Sep 22, 2010 at 22:13
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    I recently rewrote a Visual Basic application in Java. This allowed it to be run as a service under Windows (no Java GUI) - benefit to customer. Commented Apr 2, 2011 at 18:04
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    "rewrites have no direct effects/benefits for the customer" - this is often a myth, as the newer frameworks provide "built in" a lot of productivity enhancements that are either impossible or far too expensive to implement. One example, upgrading a vb6 app to a .net app allows users to open larger files (due to a 64 bit architecture) which therefore means that the end users don't have to artificially break up their work. Commented Jun 1, 2015 at 3:28
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    @Stephen true, but that is the same as saying that a game written for a playstation 4 has better graphical resources than if it were written for a playstation 1. Most server applications, web services, and back-end batch processors will not generally gain such benefits, aside from those afforded to the developers themselves. Commented Apr 7, 2020 at 14:53