Step 1. Embrace the mud
Instead of giving in to the anger and blame, it’s important to realize that this Big Pile of Mud works and puts food on the table for you and everyone in your company. Sure, it’s a mess, but it pays the bills. You might hate it. It might make you frustrated and angry. But you need to just swallow all of that and move on with the job of fixing the pile and making the mud do new things.
Once you are past all that, the next thing is to remember that the best thing to do when you are in a hole is stop digging. Job one is not to make things any worse than they already are. Don’t add another layer of depth to that huge, nested if statement. Don’t add 120 more lines of code to that God class. Don’t follow those old patterns of coupling things together and making one thing do fourteen things and mashing concerns together. In other words, don’t make any more mud.
Step 2. Apply the Boy Scout rule
The first standard you should set is to always apply the Boy Scout Rule to your code. That is, always leave it a little better and a little neater than you found it. For instance, if you find code that isn’t formatted to the company’s formatting standards, format it properly. If you find code that has crappy variable names, change them to be more descriptive. If you find code that has lines of code that do seven things, refactor out to explaining variables. Set a policy that the time spent improving code as you run across it, even in little ways, is well worth it.
