There are lots of good reasons to refactor, but "consistency and reducing redundancy" doesn't seem very compelling. Anyway.
A lot of folks have talked about process and tools, and those are important and I assume you know what you're doing. The real issue is morale. Let's face it, at this point you're requirements are probably stable and your team is familiar with the system and everyone's probably been thinking about how they might do differently in the back of their head. And code is easy to write.
If you have people on your team see what they've done and know they can do better and want to give it a try, things will go smoothly. If you have people on your team who regard this as a needless rewite, on the other hand, morale will suffer and production will be surprisingly low.
If you have some of both, take the people who want to rewrite it and do it from scratch in another branch. If you don't have buy-in from all of the developers and try to fold changes into the original product and it doesn't go smoothly, company politics will turn against you and you'll probably be looking for a new job.
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Would you ever hire a chef who couldn't cook? A foreman who never built anything? A colonel who never fired a gun?
There are lots of good reasons to refactor, but "consistency and reducing redundancy" doesn't seem very compelling. Anyway.
A lot of folks have talked about process and tools, and those are important and I assume you know what you're doing. The real issue is morale. Let's face it, at this point you're requirements are probably stable and your team is familiar with the system and everyone's probably been thinking about how they might do differently in the back of their head. And code is easy to write.
If you have people on your team see what they've done and know they can do better and want to give it a try, things will go smoothly. If you have people on your team who regard this as a needless rewite, on the other hand, morale will suffer and production will be surprisingly low.
If you have some of both, take the people who want to rewrite it and do it from scratch in another branch. If you don't have buy-in from all of the developers and try to fold changes into the original product and it doesn't go smoothly, company politics will turn against you and you'll probably be looking for a new job.