On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Jon S. Berndt wrote: > Guys, I've got a question that's come up in my day job. I'd like to ask for > your opinion. If you had to justify to your boss the rewrite of old C code > in C++, could you do it? If cost is an issue (isn't it always?), is it worth > it to expend the resources to clean up code that may have been gathering > flotsam and jetsam for years - particularly if you want to add some new > features (base on new requirements), anyhow?
In my limited experience, unless you're going to be re-writing large amounts of the code anyway, and have a very clear specification for the existing component, I don't think it's justifiable. My day job is as a manager of a software development team, and I'd be very sceptical of anyone proposing to do so without very strong arguments and some extremely thorough testing planned. Cleaning up cruft is good, but there's a high risk that you clean up too much or remove some oddity that someone is relying on. I have been involved in one re-write from C to Java, which was forced due to very strong external requirements. The C code was old and didn't have a clear specification, and the main requirement for the development was to duplicate the existing external behaviour. We built a new suite of automated regression so we would have some idea of how the Java code measured up. This was good as far as it went, but really wasn't sufficient, and we had a higher than normal defect rate as a result. The project was also a lot larger than it looked at first glance, particularly the amount of time required to create a good regression suite. >From memory, I think we spent significantly more time creating the regression suite than we did actually coding. -Stuart ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
