It’s a tough call to make, but sometimes the best thing for a business to do is to throw away working code if it’s not what the business needs to be successful right now.
Eric Ries wrote an insightful post back in February 2009.
Lessons Learned: Throwing away working code.
A business which is not making money is dying, however good the code, but changing the business into one which does make money may mean ditching lots of things which have cost a lot, and even seem to have intrinsic value.
When you are thinking about marketing and promotion, do you make the most of your great staff?
Our marketing person realized that one HUGE asset our library has, and therefore our community has … are our librarians. So we sometimes need to focus on our staff, rather than just on our stuff.
via The Librarian IS the Rockstar | David Lee King.
It’s happened on most reasonable sized projects I have worked on. The benefits of test coverage an continuous integration are obvious and pay back immediately. But, somehow, as the project grows and diversifies, a point is reached where the complexity and run time of the CI process begins to slow down development rather than assist it.
Jez Humble has put together some interesting thoughts on how to deal with this issue. Read more at Deployment pipeline anti-patterns.