I’m really far behind on podcasts. I have a long commute, and listen to one audiobook every month, filling the slack time with a selection of podcasts. It happens that between two really long books (Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, both of which I’d recommend) and quite a few snow days I’ve managed to fall behind.
This is the context in which I listened to Episode 77 of iDeveloper Live, on whether to rewrite or not rewrite an application. I was meant to be on that program but had to pull out due to a combination of being ill and pressing on with writing what would become Discworld: the Ankh-Morpork Map. I imagine that one of these two factors was the cause of the other.
Anyway, listening to the podcast made me decide to put my case forward. It’s unfortunate that I wasn’t part of the live discussion but I hope that what I have to say still has value. I’d recommend listening to what Scotty, Uli, John and Pilky have to say on the original podcast, too. If I make references to the discussion in the podcast, I’ll apologise in advance for failing to remember which person said what.
The view from the outside
The point that got me thinking about this was the marketing for a version x.0 of an app. I don’t remember what the app was, I think Danny Greg probably posted the link to it. The release described how the app was “completely rewritten” from the previous version; an announcement that’s not uncommon in software release notes.
My position is this: A complete rewrite is neither a feature nor a benefit. It’s a warning. It says “warning: you might like the previous version, in fact that’s probably why you’re buying it, but what we’re now selling you has nothing in common with it”. It says “warning: the workflow you’re accustomed to in this app may no longer work, or may have different bugs than the ones you’ve discovered how to work around”. It says “warning: this product and the previous version are similar in name alone”. This is what I infer when I read that your product has been rewritten.
The view from the inside
As programmers, we’re saying “but I’ve got to rewrite this, it’s so old and crappy”. Why is it old and crappy? Is it because we weren’t trained to write readable code, and we weren’t trained to read code? Someone on the podcast referred to the “you should hate code you wrote six months ago or you’re not learning” trope. No. You should look at code you were writing six months ago and see how it could be improved. You should be able to decide whether to make those improvements, depending on whether they would benefit the product.
Many of the projects I’ve worked on have taken more than six months to complete. In each case, we could have either released it, or we could still be in a cycle of finding code that was modified more than six months ago, looking at it in disgust, throwing it away and writing it again—and waiting for the new regression bug reports to come in.
Bear in mind that source code is a liability, not an asset. When you tear something out to rewrite it from scratch, you’re using up time and money to create a thing that provides the same value as the thing you’re replacing. It’s at times like this that we enjoy waving our hands and talking about Technical Debt. Martin Fowler:
The tricky thing about technical debt, of course, is that unlike money it’s impossible to measure effectively. The interest payments hurt a team’s productivity, but since we CannotMeasureProductivity, we can’t really see the true effect of our technical debt.
We can’t really see the true effect. So how do you know that this rewrite is going to pay off? If you have some problem now it might be clear that this problem can be addressed more cheaply with a rewrite than by extending or modifying existing code. This is the situation Uli described in the podcast; they’d used some third-party library in version 1, which got them a quick release but had its problems. Having learned from those problems, they decided to replace that library in version 2.
Where you have problems, you can solve them either by modification or by rewriting. If you think that some problem might occur in the future, then leave it: you don’t make a profit by solving problems that no-one has.
A case study
While I had a few jobs in computing beforehand, all of which required that I write code, my first job where the title meant “someone who writes code” started about six years ago, at a company that makes anti-virus software. I was a developer (and would quickly become lead developer, despite not being ready) on the Mac version of the software.
This software had what could be described as an illustrious history: it was older than some of the readers of this blog (which is not uncommon: Cocoa is old enough to vote in the UK and UNIX is middle-aged). It started life as a Lightspeed/THINK C product, then become a PowerPlant product at around the time of the PowerPC transition. When I started working on it in 2007 the PowerPlant user interface still existed, but it did look out of place and dated. In addition, Apple were making noises about the library not being supportable on future versions of Mac OS X, so the first project for the new team was to build a new UI in Cocoa.
We immediately set out getting things wrong more quickly than any other team in the company. The lead developer when I joined had plenty of experience on the MS-DOS and Windows versions of the product, but had never worked on a Mac nor in Objective-C: then I became the lead developer, having worked in Objective-C but never in a team of more than one person. I won’t go into all of the details but the project ended up taking multiple times its estimated duration: not surprising, when the team had never worked together and none of the members had worked on this type of project so our estimates were really random numbers.
At the outset of this project, being untrained in the reading of other people’s code, I was dismayed by what I saw. I repeatedly asked for permission to rewrite other parts of the system that had copyright dates from when Kurt Cobain was still making TV appearances. I was repeatedly refused: the correct decision as while the old code had its bugs it was a lot more stable than what we were writing, and as it had already been written it cost a lot less to supply to the customer[*].
Toward the eventual end of the project, I asked my manager why we hadn’t given up on it after a year of getting things wrong, declared that a learning exercise and started over. Essentially, why couldn’t we take the “I hate the code I wrote last year, let’s start from scratch” approach. His answer was that at least one person would’ve got frustrated and quit after having their code thrown away; then we’d have no product and also no team so would not be in a better position.[*]
Eventually the product did get out of the door, and while I’m no longer involved with it I can tell that the version shipping today still has most of the moving parts that were developed during my time and before. Gradual improvement, responding to changes in what customers want and what suppliers provide, has stood that product in good stead for over two decades.
[*] It’s important to separate these two arguments from the Sunk Cost Fallacy. In neither case are we including the money spent on prior work. The first paragraph says “from today’s perspective, what we already have is free and what you haven’t written is not free, but they both do the same thing”. The second paragraph says “from today’s perspective, finishing what you’ve done costs a lot of money. Starting afresh costs a lot of money and introduces social disruption. But they both do the same thing.”
