What can you do to a legacy codebase that will have the greatest impact on improving the quality?

Question

As you work in a legacy codebase what will have the greatest impact over time that will improve the quality of the codebase?

• Remove unused code
• Remove dup

Answer 1

I can relate to this question as I currently have in my lap one of 'those' old school codebase. Its not really legacy but its certainly not followed the trend of the years.

I'll tell you the things I would love to fix in it as they bug me every day:

• Document the input and output variables
• Refactor the variable names so they actually mean something other and some hungarian notation prefix followed by an acronym of three letters with some obscure meaning. CammelCase is the way to go.
• I'm scared to death of changing any code as it will affect hundreds of clients that use the software and someone WILL notice even the most obscure side effect. Any repeatable regression tests would be a blessing since there are zero now.

The rest is really peanuts. These are the main problems with a legacy codebase, they really eat up tons of time.