How to restrain one's self from the overwhelming urge to rewrite everything?

Question

Setup

Have you ever had the experience of going into a piece of code to make a seemingly simple change and then realizing that you\'ve just stepped into a wasteland tha

Answer 1

The most memorable project of this kind for me occured some 4 years ago when I was called in to a remote office to "help" with a project that was due in 1 week for major presentation to the client and was not working yet at all. The project had been primarily off-shored to India, and IMO, a project management failure resulted in a ton of spaghetti code that was too fragmented to ever work properly in its current form.

After a full day's review, I presented my opinion to the management that the project simply needed wholesale refactoring and reorganization or it would never work properly. The result of this discussion was 6 days of 20 hours work / 4 hours sleep, 2 of which I actually spent sleeping on the couch in the company lobby due to the wasted time when driving back to the hotel.

The major improvements to the code included:

• Application of naming standards
• Moved into source control
• Development of a build process
• Documentation of the individual components

Most of the original code was left in place, but simply moved and reorganized / refactored to make it sustainable in the long term. Was it hell week? Sure. Did it make the project more successful? Yep.

I can't live with spaghetti code, and I'll often donate my own personal time to address it.