Phil Collins

Phil is a Development Director for a software development company. He has programmed and developed code since the days of the Sinclair ZX81.

Before joining his current role Phil had previously worked as a web developer and an Omnimark programmer. Currrently he leads a team of developers in a massive rewrite project as the flagship company product moves away from its legacy platform.

Sessions Submitted

Rewriting software is the single worst mistake you can make - apparently.

Joel Spolsky once said that rewriting software from scratch is the single worst strategic mistake a software development company can ever make.[1] We all know of the Netscape story and the never-released v5.0. So as a developer how do you react when you're faced with the fact that there is little other choice than do exactly what you're told you should never do.

During this session I will describe how as a team we are managing to beat the odds and rewrite our main flagship product from a legacy platform into VB.net; as well as describing the decisions behind the choice of language, the choice of development methodology, how we built the project plan, how we learnt from our mistakes and our successes, how working with Bournemouth University and their study of our rewrite has helped us, and whether or not we still think it's something you should never do.

This presentation was first run at DDD9. This version of the presentation now includes new slides on testing as per the feedback from DDD9.

[1] Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do, Part I
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html