Step 1. Embrace the mud
As a substitute of giving in to the anger and blame, it’s essential to comprehend that this Huge Pile of Mud works and places meals on the desk for you and everybody in your organization. Certain, it’s a large number, but it surely pays the payments. You may hate it. It would make you annoyed and offended. However you want to simply swallow all of that and transfer on with the job of fixing the pile and making the mud do new issues.
As soon as you’re previous all that, the subsequent factor is to do not forget that one of the best factor to do when you’re in a gap is cease digging. Job one is to not make issues any worse than they already are. Don’t add one other layer of depth to that vast, nested if assertion. Don’t add 120 extra strains of code to that God class. Don’t comply with these previous patterns of coupling issues collectively and making one factor do fourteen issues and mashing issues collectively. In different phrases, don’t make any extra mud.
Step 2. Apply the Boy Scout rule
The primary customary it is best to set is to all the time apply the Boy Scout Rule to your code. That’s, all the time go away it somewhat higher and somewhat neater than you discovered it. For example, in case you discover code that isn’t formatted to the corporate’s formatting requirements, format it correctly. In the event you discover code that has crappy variable names, change them to be extra descriptive. In the event you discover code that has strains of code that do seven issues, refactor out to explaining variables. Set a coverage that the time spent bettering code as you run throughout it, even in little methods, is properly value it.