Read this fine article by Joel Spolsky : Things You Should Never Do It is a great article, one that invokes mixed feelings. The article talks against rewriting (large scale) software.....from scratch. Joel was kind enough to consider all those who write software as true programmers ; people who give enough thought and not just code up something that works. However, it is far different in the real world. That said, I am neither completely in disagreement with Joel nor am I advocating to rewrite large scale software once the code is identified as a mess. Most people who are programmers are just people who write code for a living. Nothing wrong but forget the passion part of it. So the quality of the code that is generated is questionable. True programmers are different. They first build those intangible constructs in mind of how the code should be, and then they write code that reflects to the reader the intent of the task being achieved. Hence such code is readable, modu...
Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind. I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkbly well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. - From "The Practice of Programming" by Brian W Kernighan & Rob Pike.