Wow, sounds like my workplace - pretty much the same story, except the two devs who wrote the 300,000 line monstrosity are already gone (worst page record: a page with one topic and 300 comments generates over 10,000 - yes, ten thousand - calls to MySQL, AFTER caching).
In our case, we're squeezing in a complete rewrite of the codebase around existing client work using the old platform. We're writing it as a few separate services (authorization service, content service, front-end, reporting service, and administration front-end) instead of a huge, monolithic app. To do this in a decent time frame (a few months), we're adding 5 or 6 contractors to a 3-person dev team, leaving 3 other devs able to deal with the existing platform.
Hehe - to actually answer the question, though, the method you are describing might work with enough good planning behind it. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like your lead dev is willing to do that. You will probably find that the amount of work required to fix the existing system is within a stone's throw of the work required to rewrite it.
I wouldn't call your described plan a "good" way of doing things, necessarily.
Comments
Wow, sounds like my workplace - pretty much the same story, except the two devs who wrote the 300,000 line monstrosity are already gone (worst page record: a page with one topic and 300 comments generates over 10,000 - yes, ten thousand - calls to MySQL, AFTER caching).
In our case, we're squeezing in a complete rewrite of the codebase around existing client work using the old platform. We're writing it as a few separate services (authorization service, content service, front-end, reporting service, and administration front-end) instead of a huge, monolithic app. To do this in a decent time frame (a few months), we're adding 5 or 6 contractors to a 3-person dev team, leaving 3 other devs able to deal with the existing platform.
Hehe - to actually answer the question, though, the method you are describing might work with enough good planning behind it. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like your lead dev is willing to do that. You will probably find that the amount of work required to fix the existing system is within a stone's throw of the work required to rewrite it.
I wouldn't call your described plan a "good" way of doing things, necessarily.
Personally I think its a horrible plan, but I want to get feed back from people who are more experience them me.
I think we should rebuild with an experience architect leading the way, but it doesn't seem that the company sees that a reasonable.