Barrel Aged Software Development: brewscheme as a four-year old

The term software development implies some type of change over time. While Stata goes through extraordinary steps to support backwards compatibility, user-contributors may not always see a need to continue developing programs shared with the community. How do you know if/when you should add additional programs/functionality to an existing package? Is it easy/practical to extend existing Stata code or is it easier to refactor everything from the ground up? What can you do to make it easier to extend existing code? While -brewscheme- may have started as a relatively simple package with a couple of commands and limited functionality, in the four years since it was introduced it has grown into a multifunctional library of tools to make it easier to create customized visualizations in Stata while being mindful of color sight impairments. I will share my experience, what I have learned, and strategies related to how I dealt with these questions in the context of the development of the -brewscheme- package. I will also show what the additional features do that the original -brewscheme- did not do.