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Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase - Change Messy Software Without Breaking It
(understandlegacycode.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Programming
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The Mikado Method, eh?
(All together) Three junior devs at work are we,
Busy and harried as devs can be,
Compiler warnings flowing freely,
Three junior devs at work!
(Alice) Everything is a source of bugs! (Laughter)
(Bob) When they wrote this, were they on drugs? (Laughter)
(Carlos) Don't touch our "World's Best Coder" mugs! (Laughter)
(All together) Three junior devs at work!
You have to imagine Alice, Bob, and Carlos 25 years later, working on production code that was created like this.
XKCD on this: https://m.xkcd.com/2730/
By the way, I am currently working on a 20 year old code base that was in production use all the years and was continuously adapted. At least the people who wrote this were (more or less) knowing what they were doing. I guess I should ask for a pay rise...