No. No. No.

We are NOT rewriting the software from scratch.
Why are people so keen on rewriting? Have they no experience??

"We will make EVERYTHING better then before!"

One of the main problems IMO is that the specific software often has little to no usable documentation.

Because they don't have enough experience yet, they don't know that, even if it's software that you've written yourself, in a few months it would be the same as learning third party codebase, and you would realize it sucks just about the same

Ehmm for a project we rewrote the whole damn thing at least 4 times.. Works extremely fast now though..

because no one understands how the old code works since all the developers left and quite frankly its a big ball of mud

@allanx2000 which means that a rewrite will miss all the little odd fixes that has accumulated over time and that are necessary for it to work. Especially if there are connections to other systems or many different users or use cases.

Out project is in to the 15th year and has progressed from vbscript in classic asp to c# in asp.net. Gradually replacing one page or handler at a time.

Next major release will drop the last vestige of asp and vbcsript, 3 url handlers that has just never required a rewrite ;)

But we are moving to a cluster and the old asp pages does not work with the new deploy environment.

@Voxera well the current code is so complicated that a single change somehow breaks it anyway and we spend days debugging to find out why...

@allanx2000 My first take on such a code would be to try to break out some part. One class or even one function and map it out and where it is used.

Then take another while trying to keep the whole thing working.

A complete rewrite usually starts fresh from the requirements but those are seldom complete which causes the rewritten version to recreate old bugs long fixed.

@Voxera oh OK. Actually when I think of rewriting, I guess it's similar to what you said and more like refactoring: rethinking the design and cleaning it up/creating a framework

@allanx2000 yes, thats refactoring in my book.

My last rewrite was building the new version in mvc and c# where the old version was classic asp and switching the whole application at once. Never want to do that again.