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Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase - Change Messy Software Without Breaking It
(understandlegacycode.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Programming
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The grain of truth in this is that organizations which have accumulated a lot of technical debt tend to continue to be organizations which accumulate a lot of technical debt.
Let's say you take a new student job as a kitchen helper in a restaurant, and on day one, you learn that people there don't really wash the dishes - they just make them look somehow clean.
Do you walk to your boss and tell him: "Hey boss, I got an idea, we could wash our dishes, what do you think?"
It is different if you have more of a say, as in, you are the chef. You could leverage that good chefs are hard to find. You could point at customer reviews with complaints.
But as an apprentice, I would advise to look for a better kitchen. Especially since tidying up 300 k lines of spaghetti code will take many person-years.