I just really feel like I should do some cleaning up while I’m in there changing the code.
— A Developer Working on a Legacy Code Base
The rewards of management can take a long time to recognize, but I heard this gem a while back. The developer was bothered by the state of the legacy code he was working with and really wanted to do some cleanup. Usual issue–almost no tests in place, plenty of nasty EJB dependencies and hard to test. For now he’s doing simple refactorings like renaming variables, extracting methods, and just deleting old commented out code.
It can take a while to convince a developer that it’s worth the effort to do some cleanup when working with legacy code. Many times it seems overwhelming to bother with changes. It’s a mess and not worth fixing. Then they reach the point where they’re not willing to just deal with patching up the problem. Every time they touch the code they make small improvements. This is how you wrangle in a nasty legacy codebase and make it workable and maintainable for the long haul.