If you've developed well structured code that separates the development into different layer and if the different layers are designed to communicate in clearly defined ways then this is quite possible.

Say you have a data layer, computation layer and presentation layer for example.  Say the data layer has separate parts to handle objects, textures and animation data.  You may have coded your app so that it runs nice and quick but to do that you uncompress all the images used in textures and keep the uncompressed data in memory.  If users start using lots of very high res images that crash your app by forcing it into disc swapping all the time.  What you might do then is change the part of the data storage to a slightly slower but more memory efficient approach that only uncompresses an image when it is being used.  As your code that uses the image still sends back the same data you can still use the same code for everything else.  This is a good thing as it saves on development time and thus keeps the cost of the end product down or lets you add extra features.

Of course this approach isn't always the best one.  If you need to write really fast code you may have to sacrifice ellegance.  I've had to do that a couple of times but if you can get a 2000% speed increase on a crucial part of a project it may be a sacrifice your prepared to make.

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