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> Assuming your primary source of technical debt is all the little corners that get cut in order to meet a schedule, and assuming that the rewrite is being given far less time to get to a certain level of functionality than the original software took to get there, then one would expect the team to need to cut more corners to finish the rewrite.

That's a good point, but it considers only “internal” technical debt. Legacy platforms often have “external” technical debt that you are carrying, especially when they are unsupported by the original vendor. Rewrites are often motivated by the desire to escape this external technical debt, and end up trading a reduction in external technical debt for an increase in internal technical debt.




By "external" technical debt, do you mean crufty old 3rd-party components? Why not deal with those by just swapping out that one component?

edit: Nvm, realize you're probably talking about something like migrating off of VB6, or ditching a mainframe.


I agree, and migrating from a dead end platform is one the few legitimate justifications for a full rewrite.




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