When to rewrite vs. upgrade?

Posted by MrGumbe on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by MrGumbe
Published on 2010-05-04T15:31:56Z Indexed on 2010/05/04 15:38 UTC
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sdlc

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best-practices

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project-planning

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scope

All custom legacy software needs changing, or so say our users. Sometimes they want a feature or two added and all that is necessary to change a bit of code, add a control, or some other minor upgrade task. Sometimes they want to ditch their error-prone VB5 desktop solution and rewrite the whole thing as a rich Web 2.0 ASP.NET MVC application. More often, however, the scope of changes to legacy functionality lies somewhere between these two extremes.

What rules of thumb to you use to decide whether you should upgrade an existing application or start from scratch?

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