Andrew Podner: Rock On, Refactor, or Re-roll?

In his latest post Andrew Podnet looks at a common situation for developers during one project or another. It's the struggle whether to "rock on" and keep developing a project as it's planned, refactor what's already there into something new or re-roll the whole thing completely, scrapping it for a possibly better structure.

I went to my standard code library, developed on my own over a period of 3 or 4 years and starting piecing together a core application that I could start building on. I worked on this application diligently from June to September, and I would say in that time I had made it 70% of the way through the app. I was being relatively careful about doing manual functional tests, and I felt good about what I was doing with the application where security practices were concerned. Then 2 things happened almost simultaneously that really put a wrench in the works.

He was working on a project for several months, but due to other circumstances, he had to set it aside for a while. When he came back, he had a new perspective on things and saw lots of places in the code that things could have been done different/better. The post goes through some of his thought process and how it relates to the three "roll on", "refactor" or "re-roll" the current state of the application. He does have a reminder for developers facing the same situation, though:

The whole reason I am writing this post, other than to just get my thoughts down and help make the call, is to illustrate the importance of remembering that as developers, one of our key objectives for the client is to deliver value. This is a fact that can sometimes get away from us.