> I have done a DOZEN of rewrites from langs to langs and each (bar one) have been successfully.
How large were these systems? How many developers? How long did the rewrite take?
> A good rewrite is just a good refactoring but with a higher chance of success
Are you saying it's not a restart from scratch? In that case I don't call that a rewrite. Maybe a "rewrite of this or that module" which is more likely to succeed.
Most have been mainly me. I normally was hired and get stuck doing this kind of stuff until the other team was supporting the old project. Along the way was the one that push source control, tickets system, crude CI to the larger team...
Maybe being solo or being part of a small team is good after all. A rewrite is normally called because of a BIG mess, and most of that is simplify stuff.
My niche is "enterprise" software, where is HIGHLY dependent in niche details from non-developers, so having not clarity of what the software actually do, why or how, and neither the people that use it understand it. Zero or useless documentation, and all the bad red flags you think off.
2 have been large-ish (I think from the POV of most people in my country are large but not from the POV of people that work in companies like google).
One was in a startup (at the time one of the largest paying customers of Google cloud). The other was in succession of failed attempts between maybe 2 or 3 groups of developers (the one before me was a big consultant company with a large team that left me with a BIIIIG mess!).
The longest rewrite was 2 years (from FoxPro to .NET, an ERP, 1-5 devs, only me all the time p.d: just the core, the rest was later). This was a near failure that was turned around.
The one were we failed was by lack of properly understand the severity of downtime for the customers and not provide a transparent migration, in real time, of the data. The cost in days - for the testing, upgrade and all that) cost them more money than they pay for the new software.
The company I work back them get broke working for the government in another contract and the customer was not willing to recover from it. Is certainly the most sad history of my career because it was not that impossible to turn the ship around - the software was ready, only need to retrofit how move the data without downtime-, but everything go under in no time...
> A good rewrite is just a good refactoring but with a higher chance of success
>Are you saying it's not a restart from scratch? In that case I don't call that a rewrite. Maybe a "rewrite of this or that module" which is more likely to succeed.
Not, the rewrites have ben from scratch, including from LANG-A to LANG-B.
What i mean is that the properties of a successfully refactoring/rewrite are similar. Only that with a rewrite you can go DEPPER and WIDER in what you change/improve.
For example, when I rewrite certain program that uses Access/Excel just using PostgreSQL was a massive plus, not just on speed and reliability. A refactoring probably will only go for internal cleaning but with the rewrite I slash a lot of moving parts.
How large were these systems? How many developers? How long did the rewrite take?
> A good rewrite is just a good refactoring but with a higher chance of success
Are you saying it's not a restart from scratch? In that case I don't call that a rewrite. Maybe a "rewrite of this or that module" which is more likely to succeed.