Can you elaborate on this part? I am trying to understand.
> in a mature product, reading and maintaining code takes about 10 times as much effort as writing it in the first place
Wouldn't that imply that rewriting a mature codebase from scratch would take ten times less effort than reading and maintaining it?
I only saw two instances where (different) management approved a complete rewrite of a working product and in both cases it turned out to be a disaster, because it is easy to severely underestimate how much effort it will take to match the features, quality and performance of the old codebase. I suspect it is almost universally better to refactor the old codebase incrementally.
Based on that, I take that you mean something else and I didn't get your point.
> in a mature product, reading and maintaining code takes about 10 times as much effort as writing it in the first place
Wouldn't that imply that rewriting a mature codebase from scratch would take ten times less effort than reading and maintaining it?
I only saw two instances where (different) management approved a complete rewrite of a working product and in both cases it turned out to be a disaster, because it is easy to severely underestimate how much effort it will take to match the features, quality and performance of the old codebase. I suspect it is almost universally better to refactor the old codebase incrementally.
Based on that, I take that you mean something else and I didn't get your point.