Years ago, I did an article for Ed Yourdon's "American Programmer" in the code-reuse issue. I always took the contrary point of view, so I did "the case for starting over". Talking to managers not engineers, I tried to describe the aging process of software and say what to look for that makes maintanence difficult and likely to introduce errors.

"If it ain't broke don't fix it" Well, why are you working on it at all? Adding new features, presumably. A messy program will be hard to extend and this may introduce problems. So if the code is OK (it works), it's still not extensible and doesn't take into account new requirements (or maintainability as a meta-requirement).

So explain that you'll change the overall architecture to accomidate new features, but you'll copy the individual functions (or the algorithm part, if you're adding arguments and making them members, but the keep it simple for the boss) over from the original work, and reviewing each as you go.

—John

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