-
Website
http://www.theequitykicker.com/ -
Original page
http://www.theequitykicker.com/2008/04/08/why-you-should-almost-never-re-write-your-software/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
Top Commenters
-
Dimitri Inglezos
9 comments · 1 points
-
Andy Warren
11 comments · 1 points
-
MatthewWarneford
10 comments · 2 points
-
jamescoops
29 comments · 1 points
-
Mike Butcher
9 comments · 1 points
-
-
Popular Threads
-
Thank you and Happy Christmas
7 hours ago · 3 comments
-
Stealth mode, schmealth mode
1 day ago · 4 comments
-
Progress towards the mobile web and away from apps
5 days ago · 15 comments
-
Your help with a new strapline for DFJ Esprit
1 week ago · 19 comments
-
Carrier decks losing share rapidly
2 days ago · 3 comments
-
Thank you and Happy Christmas
Jof: I am a fan of Brooks myself. However, I think the "throw the first one away" as a general rule is risky -- particularly for startups.
Though ideally, you'd have the time to start over and throw the first one away, we don't live in an ideal world. Even though in the long-term, throwing the first one away might be a good idea, you have to *survive* the short-term for the long-term to ever matter. For big companies where the long-term is a given, this might be ok. For startups, when resources are severely limited, it's not an easy decision.
I'd go further to say that this is one of the advantages of having a startup, especially in this space where costs can be extremely low; the option to throw something out there and completely rebuild after a couple of weeks/months, if it's not getting traction, is a great thing. And it needs to be stressed that for many readers of Nic's blog (including me) the concept of a startup is a few people bootstrapping some ideas in a garage, so I would question what "risk" actually means in reality for these people.
However, I'm straying off the point of the original post. I'd definitely agree with anyone who says that rebuilding a live web app (with lots of users and/or lots of revenue) from scratch is a difficult and often - but not always - wrong thing to do. But even then, if your re-build enables you to jump tracks onto a better revenue stream and faster growth then it needn't be a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
We threw away the first couple of prototypes, but from the point we created a fully working application we have only refactored. New API, new permissions engine, etc. The temptation is to go for the big rebuild, and that pressure is ground-up from the development team.