Software Design X-Rays

Nothing’s beautiful from every point of view.

Horace

Chapter 8Toward Modular Monoliths through the Social View of Code

Many of today’s codebases are trapped in hard-to-maintain monolithic systems where the lure of a complete rewrite becomes more attractive with every development task that we painfully slide over to the Done column. However, a large-scale rewrite is always a strategic risk, and it will reset much of the existing team’s understanding of the codebase. A worse but learned and understood design may trump its cleaner replacement.

In this chapter we discuss the pros and cons of rewrites, and we cover techniques that help us get situational awareness of existing architectures by evaluating both technical and social aspects. We use ...