How to sell a big refactor or rewrite to the business?
summary
Machine-assisted code churn shows troubling numbers: one study finds 75% of lines rewritten within two weeks, 39% annual churn and a 41% rise in failure rate. Practical wins come from concrete moves: rebuilding a Flash-based product as a separate JS business edition and charging more, reimplementing a CSV import that drops a 25‑hour run to 5 seconds with a single SQL query, and shipping VS Code as a new Node.js IDE. Successful rewrites add customer value, often by delivering incrementally or by creating internal competition.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:14Code quality crisis
- 5:55Why rewrites fail
- 8:25Rewrite case studies
- 31:10Rewrite assumptions
- 34:01Selling rewrites
- 36:57Rewrite strategies
- 40:51Incremental rewrites
- 44:31AI in rewrites
- 46:25Q&A
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