One major point of argument that I have come across in every team when building micro-services is to Use the existing code or rewrite the code?
When building new functionality the majority of the time it makes sense to rewrite capability and not the code. This may be time-consuming to build, but the monolithic platform already has a lot of redundant code.
By rewriting capability it gives an opportunity to improve the granularity of the service, revisit business functionality, and maintain a clean codebase.
Business and IT teams always spend a lot of money on solutions that are deemed to be the right way. But, many a time the only reason these extravagant solutions are running is because they are spending a lot of money on it.
One of the teams that I was part of the business spent a huge amount of licensing money every year on a proprietary solution and were hesitant to change.
However, the software was pretty tedious and it was very slow building functionalities. The team started with a POC and realized that in a few weeks they could build the same core functionalities with open-source software. They went ahead and did that and it opened up a surfeit of opportunities for the business team to improve upon.
Be rational in decision making and avoid sunk cost fallacy situation.
Stay practical in what needs to be rewritten and what needs to be reused. Sometimes the later may be a good choice as not everything in the monolith is a throwaway.
In another instance, one of the teams were struggling to re-architect complex business functionality and moving very slow. The business knew that this was going beyond the scheduled budget and time and did not yield many benefits, but they struggled to decide to dismantle the team.
It’s never too late to pull the plug when building services. In situations where certain core functionalities built don’t change much just reuse stuff. Maybe a good code review is what is required.
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