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

1. reread "Refactoring".
2. Take a piece of paper and itemize the "Bad Smells" list.
   (for each smell in BadSmells() {
   print smell.name;
   }
3. Add comments to the code including item(s) from the list.
   while( odorPersists() ) {
4. Work through the list, laser-focused on one smell at a time.
   }