>>While I agree that good, working code is a valuable asset, let's keep in mind that lots of code out there in the field (in pretty much any programming language) is a mess and the best thing that could happen to it is to be thrown away. Alan Cooper talks about "scar tissue" that results from changes to code and points how inflexible the code can become.

>That's all great for employees and managers, etc. but what about the stakeholders/investors/owners/endusers? Do they care if you would like to rewrite/fix code to get rid of something they have so much invested in? IOW, if it were your money, would you be so willing?? If so, then I guess it's nice to have money to burn...

My point was that sometimes there's long-term gain for the short-term pain of a rewrite. In many of the applications I've seen over the years, the effort needed to keep the app running and up-to-date is, over a reasonable period of time, more than the effort to rewrite. I've refused to work on such applications more than once because I considered them too fragile to be worth saving.

Obviously, that doesn't apply to every application, but in my experience, an astonishing number of running applications are extremely poorly architected and as fragile as a house of cards.

For these apps, we're not talking about burning money, but investing it. It's like the choice of whether to fix an appliance or car one more time or replace it. Keeping it running costs money and aggravation over a period of time; replacing it costs money once. The trick is to find the optimal time for the change.

Tamar