How to restrain one's self from the overwhelming urge to rewrite everything?

Question

Setup

Have you ever had the experience of going into a piece of code to make a seemingly simple change and then realizing that you\'ve just stepped into a wasteland tha

Answer 1

The impulse to rewrite is righteous, provided that:

• you "freeze" the existing code (with a label)
• you start the rewrite attempt in a separate branch
• you prepare first some unit-test in order to ascertain the current behavior and make sure you reproduce the existing features...

That said, you have to balance the rewriting process with the measure stability of the legacy code.
"If it is not broken, do not fix it" ;)