Ignore, Refactor, or Rewrite

Imagine that you have some code written, but it has problems. The problems are small enough that you could imagine rewriting the code completely, and you must choose what do. You could do nothing (ignore it), make incremental changes (refactor it), or write new code from scratch (rewrite it). How do you choose? What factors do you consider? There’s already a lot of guidance. In fact, the very existence of refactoring on the list of choices is special because the idea of refactoring code wasn’t well formed until the 1990s. When you refactor code, you make changes that improve its structure but do not change its visible behavior, and our tools are increasingly good at supporting refactoring, helping us make sweeping changes safely.