If you’ve ever seen a laundry list of the types of non-functional requirements like testability, accessibility, reliability, etc, (often called “ilities” because of their common suffix) you probably haven’t seen “rewritability”, but I really want to add it to the pile.
I’ve often found in software engineering that counterintuitively, if something is difficult or scary there’s a lot to be gained by doing it more often. I think we can probably agree that software rewrites are amoung those difficult and scary tasks.
Now that we’re starting to get better at service-oriented architecture, where networked applications are better divided into disparate services that individually have narrow responsibilities, a natural side effect is that it’s getting easier to write services that are replaceable later.
So what makes a piece of software rewritable?
Clearly defined requirements: not just what it needs to do, but also what it won’t do, so that feature-creep creeps into another more appropriate service. This one ends up requiring some discipline when the best place and the easiest place for a given responsibility don’t end up being the same service, but it’s almost always worth it.
Clearly defined interface: If you want to be able to just drop a new replacement in place of a previous one, it’s got to support all the integration points of the previous one. When interfaces are large and complicated this gets a lot harder and a lot riskier. In my opinion, this makes a lot of applications with GUIs very difficult to rewrite from scratch without anyone noticing (Maybe it’s because UX is hard. Maybe that’s because I’m terrible at GUIs.).
Small: Even with clearly defined requirements and interface, a rewrite is still going to be expensive and hard to estimate if there’s a lot to rewrite.
Any software engineers that have found themselves locked into a monolithic ball of mud application can see the obvious upsides of having a viable escape route though.
And once we’re not scared of rewrites, what new possibilities emerge? Real experimentation? Throw-away prototypes that we actually get to throw away?
How much easier is it to reason about a piece of software when it also meets all the criteria that make it easy to rewrite?