Serious question: as a user (not as a developer!), have you ever seen substantial improvement in a piece of a software from a ground-up rewrite?
In other words, have you ever used (but not co-developed) something where the developer(s) decided on stopping evolutionary work and instead embarked on a substantial rewrite, and the outcome as you saw it firsthand was a real improvement?
If so, please state your example. Please stick to personal experience, rather than hearsay. Thanks!
Though a bit niche as they were internally-used applications:
• a rewrite of a DOS utility to support Windows (this was Win2k era). A first rewrite happened and failed catastrophically since y'know, it helps to actually talk to the users. So a *second* rewrite happened (shifted to a different project-manager and actually involving users in decisions) and we got regular praise on how much better it was than either the DOS version or the half-baked Windows version
• software that ran on ruggedized DOS handheld computers was completely rewritten to run on ruggedized PocketPC PDAs. The new code made it easier to add features that were pretty much impossible to add to the old code-base, and users greatly preferred the ease-of-use (as born out by sales figures since both were offered/sold concurrently).
• several ETL tools at $DAYJOB where first iterations worked but had geeky command-line usage. So they were rewritten from the ground up, making it easier for the non-geek users to just click some buttons rather than copy/paste command-line invocations.
I wish we could do a complete rewrite on some of our in-house apps because they're split across two databases and have a LOT of normalization issues. We (in-house users and customers) bump into weird limitations all the time and a lot of processes/code is duplicated between the two stacks. But 20yrs of code/data is a lot to surrender.
Florian Haas
Tim Chase