Rewriting versus refactoring data – a practical guide

When technical debt snowballs, the team will spend more and more time addressing that debt or the fallout from it, and less time innovating. This looks functionally like higher degrees of operational toil, longer ramp-up and onboarding periods for newer team members and users, and team burnout. It’s important to stay on top of technical debt to ensure developer happiness and innovation are both front and center for the platform team.

Sometimes, this snowball can be that things have stopped behaving as expected or took more time than expected. Alternatively, it could be that what was once seen as an acceptable amount of work to run the platform prevents the platform and the team from scaling as the user base grows. Regardless of which exactly it is, as those technical debt items begin to exceed the predefined expectations for normal, the team needs to look at what it would take to return to normal or to find a new...