[move-on-by]

I like this. It seems obvious, but I’ve seen many different teams struggle with it. There is a lot of difficulty clearing the brush in a way that doesn’t break existing paths and is also repeatable. It takes a team with a vision and dedication to pull it off correctly, not to mention robust tests to ensure reliability.

One thing not mentioned, is that it’s still incredibly slow. There will be a lot of time pressure and bad optics no matter your choice, this is a lose-lose situation without the proper support. The pressure can also make it difficult to not create new brush in the process.

[godshatter]

I do this when I can get away with it but I worry that by cleaning one small area I'll find out the hard way that something else was relying on that bit of code being incorrect and I'll have exposed some subtle bug that hasn't bitten us yet, but probably will in some unexpected way.

[dhorthy]

engineers always want to re write from scratch and it never works.

a tale as old as time - my second job out of college back in like 2016, I landed at the tail end of a 3-month feature-freeze refactor project. was pitched to the CEO as 1-month, sprawled out to 3 months, still wasn't finished. Non-technical teams were pissed, technical teams were exhausted, all hope was lost. Ended up cutting a bunch of scope and slopping out a bunch of bugs anyway.