On 3 Jul 2013, at 16:40, Sean Bamforth <[email protected]> wrote:

> 1) Does this sort of thing (re-imagining a old application) sound like fun?

Re-imagining an application can be fun, as by this point a company/team has 
accumulated a lot of domain knowledge. Formalising that knowledge, reconciling 
conflicts, questioning the value of what's already been built etc is a 
difficult challenge. But I wouldn't do that myself by starting writing code on 
day 1. I can only see that resulting in a scattergun outcome, none of the teams 
will have enough chance to get a solid enough understanding of the business. 
The risk I see is that if, as Lee suggested, you attract inexperienced 
developers, you'll end up with a load of shiny toys but no practical 
improvement to the business itself.

> 2) What would I have to pay you / offer to get you to come?

I"m skeptical enough of the value of this that you couldn't pay me to go. 
However if it actually went ahead, and I wasn't too busy, I might turn up for 
free just to study how it went. (My answer to 1 is only a theory, after all.)

> 3) Anyone been to anything like this before?

I haven't. I've seen it proposed as an internal event at one company, but as 
far as I know it never happened.

> Most importantly, what are your thoughts about this? 

I wasn't able to understand from your original post the reason behind the 
proposed rewrite. My feeling is the first step should be a root cause analysis 
of the business, to understand why they have such a large application they feel 
they can't do anything with. The important thing is to learn the steps they 
took to end up in this situation, because without that they could easily repeat 
the same mistakes at great expense – and they probably would. They need a clear 
understanding of their goals and current obstacles before they can judge if a 
rewrite will help. With no further information, my experience suggests the 
answer is probably not.

Ash

-- 
http://www.patchspace.co.uk/
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